Design and development of a software tool to assist ISO 50001 implementation in the manufacturing sector

Abstract

Certified energy management systems suffer from a perception that they require exhaustive quantities of time and resources to operate, and that this time could be more beneficially spent saving energy through improvement projects. It is commonplace for processes such as energy performance indicator development, energy review and action planning to be implemented in manual and hence resource-intensive processes. No effective web-based tools currently exist to aid end users in processes. As part of an embedded study working with three large manufacturing companies, it was found that 5–75 days were spent implementing these three key aspects of a structured energy management system. Web-based solutions offer the potential to streamline the operation of these resource heavy components of energy management systems. This article focuses on the early stage development and beta testing of a web-based action planning and energy project visualisation tool which has been developed and tested on one of the embedded study participants. The results from this testing demonstrate a wiliness of the participant companies to engage with web-based tools to minimise their ISO 50001 resource requirements once they are designed in such a way as to facilitate ease of use.