Keeping Energy Costs in Check During the Winter Months

by David Carrick | Jan 8, 2019 | Energy Efficiency

Keeping Energy Costs in Check During the Winter Months

As we approach the cool winter season, remember that heating, ventilation and air-conditioning can account for approximately 30 percent of a business’s energy usage. Before considering purchasing new equipment, determine how much energy your business’s HVAC system actually uses. Using a well-designed system and implementing comprehensive energy saving techniques can help control your business’s utility costs.

Reduce your facility’s load allowing the existing system to operate less frequently.
Implementation of an energy management system can provide great savings to your HVAC equipment.
Set zones to turn off exhaust fans when not needed and control the temperature of spaces at night.
When purchasing new equipment, select units that are Energy Star qualified.
Consider energy recovery ventilation systems to reclaim waste energy from exhaust and use it to condition the incoming air.
Combine a dehumidification component to your HVAC system to increase customer or employee comfort and reduce the need for larger equipment.

To learn more about energy efficiency, contact Jerry Biser.

Jerry Biser
Center Director, WVMEP

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The Benefit of Instruction

by David Carrick | Jan 8, 2019 | Continuous Improvement

The Benefit of Instruction

Are you experiencing slowdowns in production? Do your cycle times vary depending on shift? Are you experiencing quality issues? Have you tried to improve a process with no success? Are you concerned about the effectiveness of training and on-boarding practices?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, job instructions and work instructions can help. Job instructions and work instructions are two different methods used to guide the work necessary to provide a product or service the customer wants, when the customer wants it. But how? Job instructions and work instructions identify accepted best practices and document them in a way that is easy to understand, and allows your team to successfully complete a task using the instruction.

Some of the many benefits generated by job instructions and work instructions include providing a tool for properly training new and existing employees, eliminating shortcuts, and overlooking details that may be second nature to some. As trainees prove an understanding of their responsibilities and begin to work on their own, job instructions and work instructions continue to provide benefit by serving as a reference guide for questions that arise during day-to-day operation and serving as a tool for problem solving on the plant floor, allowing the root cause to quickly be identified and addressed.

Job instructions and work instructions also provide the foundation for continuous improvement activities by minimizing variation and establishing repeatability in a task that can be reviewed for improvement opportunities. To learn more about the differences between job instructions and work instructions, which one is right for you, and how the WVU-IE/MEP can help you realize the benefits these documents generate, contact David Carrick at 412.327.9119.

David Carrick
Industrial Extension Engineer

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