KPIs or key performance indicators have been around for a long time. Depending on the
industry, there are numerous types and uses of KPIs. Traditionally, KPIs have been used
for financially based measurements and comparisons. This chapter focuses on the
creation and use of KPIs for energy management in manufacturing (energy management
performance indicators or EnPIs). At the highest level, businesses are constantly
challenged to measure the performance of peer plants and track corporate improvements
over time to satisfy stakeholders within the organization. In this chapter, we will discuss
the use of EnPIs to measure, track, improve, and compare the energy efficiency of
manufacturing processes.
Industries such as commercial real estate and retailing have standard benchmark
EnPIs that can be used to measure performance of a given facility with other similar
facilities on a normalized basis. For example, the Department of Energy website offers
many benchmarks for commercial office buildings and shopping malls. However,
similar metrics and benchmarks for manufacturing processes are hard to find.
Manufacturing processes and plants are often too varied to have a common set of
EnPIs or metrics that can be universally applied across a diversified business, let alone