Reducing energy usage in a manufacturing facility through a behavior change based approach

Many companies have developed energy reduction programs for their manufacturing facilities to reduce their operational costs while also decreasing their greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of these manufacturing facilities have made progress in reducing their energy usage through technology changes, such as purchasing more efficient lighting or replacing old chillers, however, these improvements are often capital intensive. The goal of this thesis is to explore the use of low cost employee behavior changes to help a manufacturing facility reduce its energy usage. The author conducted a six month case study at Raytheon's Integrated Air Defense Center (IADC) in which a new approach for achieving energy related employee behavior changes was implemented. The framework is unique to the author but builds upon lean manufacturing principles, social psychology research, and energy management fundamentals. The approach first raises awareness and engages employees, second, helps employees develop energy saving improvements, and lastly, creates a mechanism to sustain improvements and behavior changes moving forward. The benefits of using such an approach are greater employee engagement (the percentage of employees who participated in a voluntary energy reduction program rose from 38% to 78%), more energy saving ideas being implemented (over 60 employee generated energy saving improvements were implemented on the manufacturing floor), and, ultimately, a reduction in wasted energy. Additionally, a real-time feedback system was designed and installed that provided manufacturing employees with information on their cell's energy usage. This real-time feedback system was developed to help sustain improvements and further enable energy reductions through employee behavior changes. While specific tactics and tools of the applied approach may be unique to Raytheon's IADC facility, the strategy and insights can be universally applied.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Norelli, Michael A., IV (Michael Anthony)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sarah Slaughter and Leon Glicksman.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Engineering Systems Division.
• Leaders for Global Operations Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/59169

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/59169