Business: Industrial
Getting Ideas for Energy Management Opportunities
2.1.7 Considering energy issues in change management
change management process should be an orderly integration of the change
into improved overall operations and advanced elimination of possible
undesirable effects.
When changing a process or considering a purchase or modification of equipment,
it is good practice to think about the possible effects the change may create
in the operations. The terms normally used to describe this process
are change management or management of change. Often, the review of the change
is not done, or is done inconsistently and not systematically. The benefits are
clearly the avoidance of unexpected nasty surprises later on. It is not always
possible to rectify the shortcomings that emerge and which always require an
additional expense of effort and money.
The "pause and think" process
should have already been started at
the conceptual stage by the person who proposed the change. Several criteria
may be used, such as financial considerations, production capabilities and
fit,
labour, skills required, automation, maintenance, consumables, environment
and energy
aspects of the project. The evaluation of the critical criteria should follow
the economic model of trade-off processes further described in Section 3.3,
"Selecting
and prioritizing EMO projects," page 92.
for managing the change process is consequently traced throughout the
entire approval chain.
As the project is being further
refined, and submitted for review and approval up the organization’s
ladder, the same questions should be asked by all those involved in the process.
Chances are that the reviewers will bring different
viewpoints into the evaluation and some overlooked points will get the attention
they deserve. The proposed change should also be reviewed with regard to its
interaction with other components of the operations. One of the tools that
may be used for the collective review is a checklist. It can also be a capital
requisition
form (or engineering change order form, process change request form, etc.).
These forms can be easily modified to include all the relevant project criteria,
along
with space for the reviewers’ signatures.
In better-managed companies,
the change management process is entrenched and governed by procedures to
ensure that it is being followed consistently.