From Shop Floor to Top Floor

From factory floors to corporate boardrooms, energy efficiency is top of mind for a growing number of businesses and their employees. Leading companies are pioneering new energy efficiency strategies that result in greater productivity, robust financial savings, and a lower carbon footprint. Today, we released a major study [2] that examines key practices of a diverse collection of corporations at the vanguard of innovative energy efficiency solutions.

The report, From Shop Floor to Top Floor: Best Business Practices in Energy Efficiency, features insights from detailed research and analysis collected over nearly two years. The study represents the centerpiece of our Corporate Energy Efficiency Conference [3] next week in Chicago.

Findings of the report were gathered from work [4] including a detailed survey of our Business Environmental Leadership Council [5] (BELC) members and other leading companies, in-depth case studies of six companies, a series of workshops on key energy efficiency topics, broader research in the corporate energy field, and development of a full-featured Web portal [6]. The web component serves as a “living document” for highlighting and updating key findings from the project as well as providing tools, resources, and other valuable information.

Our President Eileen Claussen [7] said the report, “reveals a number of encouraging benefits for companies that get serious about energy efficiency. These include improved corporate reputation, productivity increases, and better worker morale and employee retention.”

Claussen led a teleconference [8] today announcing the study and was joined by report author William Prindle [9] of ICF International and executives from United Technologies Corporation [10] (think helicopters and space suits) and PepsiCo [11] (soda and chips). The energy efficiency practices of these very different firms, along with those of Dow Chemical Company [12], IBM [13], Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing North America, Inc., [14] and Best Buy [15], were analyzed in depth as case studies for the report.

Other key sections of the report [2] include:

• The findings of the 65-question energy efficiency survey [16], which was distributed to nearly 100 companies to gather quantitative data and discover trends in corporate energy efficiency;
• The Seven Habits of highly efficient companies, which distills the core elements of an exemplary corporate energy efficiency strategy into a set of core practices and principles; 
• Best practices in internal operations [17], supply chain [18], and products and services [19], which focuses more specifically on techniques, tools, and other issues that have proven to be salient among the best energy efficiency strategies.

Check back for energy efficiency insights that we blog about from next week’s conference.

Tom Steinfeldt is Communications Manager