“All My Sites Need to Get ISO 50001. How Do I Make it Economical?”

If you are a multisite organisation, there are exceptional long-term cost benefits in adopting

ISO 50001 throughout an organisation. The question I address in this article is: “How do you

minimise resources in getting the standard in the first place and then maintaining it?” By

resources, I mean both internal staff resources as well as external costs.

The first question is: do all sites hold back until there is a corporate decision to do things

together? Now – I don’t think so.

Different countries have different incentives to push them along the road to ISO 50001. So,

different sites will move at different speeds. It is important that early-adopter sites are allowed

to progress and not held back while corporate decisions are being made.

This can bring a benefit to the corporation because the experiences of individual sites can

be used to pilot best practices that can then be adopted at corporate level.

So, I recommend that, if sites want to progress, encourage them to step forward.

I will briefly cover four topics:

1. Training – initial ISO 50001 training

2. Consultancy – appointment of internal or external consultants to guide the

organisation to ISO 50001

3. Implementation – IT support to make implementation fast and time efficient

4. Certification – what benefits can global certification bring?

Training

To be efficient and economical in training, you need to: define your needs; identify a global

training provider; consider modern training delivery mechanisms.

Define Needs: I recommend that you take the training experiences from the early adopter

sites and define the common training need that will suit the global organisation.

Training Provider: Identify a training provider who can deliver globally. By having the same

training provided at all sites, you will be able to achieve a training price that is cost-effective

for you and is fair to the training provider.

Training Delivery Mechanism: With today’s technology, consider how you can keep down

the cost of training by the way the training is delivered. Aside from conventional classroom

training consider: webinars – delivery of more conventional training over the web to reduce

travel time and cost and to gain economy of scale by delivery to multiple sites

simultaneously; e-learning – computer-aided learning (although this is very new for ISO 50001,

we understand that some products are under development).

Consulting

Many energy practices of your organisation are common to all sites. Some practices are

unique to individual sites for reasons of legislation, culture or type of production activity. If you

spend some collective time establishing as many global practices as possible, you will save

consultancy time and costs in the long-term as you implement ISO 50001 at individual sites.

This is true whether the consultancy team is internal or external.

The risk is that you spend too much time trying to establish global practices – so, strong

management is required to prevent endless discussion. You need to strike a balance on what

is useful to make common and what to leave at individual decisions for local sites.

Implementation – IT support

Implementation of IT support requires some investment at the beginning. However, the long-

term savings can be enormous. The savings result from: savings of time by reducing

administrative drudgery; increased energy savings through closer control of the energy

management plan; finding more energy saving opportunities by more productively using the

time saved on administration. I know of examples where ISO 50001 management time has

been cut by 50% and where energy savings have been increased by 5% – even in

organizations experienced in advanced energy management.

What I mean here is professional, properly thought out IT support – not home-built solutions

developed with an ad hoc approach – often based on a combination of spreadsheets, Web

tools and documents. These ad hoc systems often do not deliver the required efficiencies,

there is duplication of effort at every site and exchange of information between sites is

difficult. A lot of time is spent in maintaining home-built solutions – especially when there are

frequent upgrades of operating systems, browsers, spreadsheets, word processors and web

tools.

Professional IT support can be delivered by:

a custom software development project delivered by the IT department;

contracting with an IT company for custom-built software;

buying or subscribing to an ISO 50001 product that has adequate flexibility for your

needs

In deciding which approach is most suitable for you, the normal criteria for “build or buy”

apply. In any case, applying a global approach to the provision of IT support will give you

very substantial IT cost savings.

Certification

Substantial cost and resource savings can be made by taking a multisite approach to

certification. The savings come from:

economies of scale -when you have more sites, the cost per site will be lower

if all sites are registered under a single ISO 50001 certification, the Certification Body

can opt to randomly select some sites and only this selection will require on-site

auditing – this reduces costs

when you combine multisite certification with strong IT support, it is possible for

substantial amounts of documentation to be audited over the web and this minimizes

the amount of time required for on-site visits – this also reduces time and costs.

When on-site auditing is reduced, there are savings on both sides of the customer-supplier

relationship:

for the certification body, less personnel costs and less travel costs;

for the organisation being audited, less time required by the people being

interviewed and less time is spent searching for documentation on “audit day”.

We know of an example where all sites in 15 countries moved from individual ISO

certifications to a single group certification. In this case, the savings in audit travel costs alone

paid for the entire cost of ISO software installed across the 15 countries.

Bottom line:

By going with a multisite approach, there are large cost and time savings in every part of the

ISO 50001 adoption process: training; consulting; implementation; and certification. However,

do not be too centralised – let the early adopters go ahead. Do organise and plan and you

will reap the benefits.

Author: Paul F. Monaghan Ph.D., CEO, Enerit Ltd

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Note* This article was also published on the online Magazine Energy Manager Today. You

can view this article here.

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