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Energy Benchmarking

The Importance of Energy Benchmarking for Your Facility

Measuring the performance of one’s products, services and practices and comparing these with competitors within the industry has been recognized as an essential process for companies. Deemed as energy benchmarking, such concepts play an important role for facilities management because it helps ensure efficiency and improvement of your company’s performance.

Rising costs of energy are the main reason why benchmarking tools are being adopted. Companies have also been seeking out the best practices for evaluating their performance indicators. With the aid of these characteristics, your facility managers will be more capable of comparing the performance of one’s facilities with those of other leading companies. To evaluate these indicators will bring on positive results especially when data from critical areas, such as products and services, marketing, and customer satisfaction, are benchmarked.

What is Energy Benchmarking?

Energy benchmarking refers to the practice of evaluating a building’s energy consumption and comparing the outcome against other buildings. Facility managers who understand the amount of energy their building consumes and who use benchmarking for doing so are more capable of efficiently reducing energy consumption on an annual basis. In an energy benchmarking article by Facilities Net, Elevate Energy research director Rachel Scheu was cited, saying that a building’s most appropriate benchmark is its own energy consumption over time. The use of energy can change every year because of changes in equipment, occupancy, and other contributing factors. If you benchmark a facility against itself, you can aid facility managers in determining whether increased energy use is an outcome of certain factors, such as a higher number of staff members.

The Importance of Energy Benchmarking for Facilities

For facility managers, the success of their operations will be based on performance measurement. In the past years, there has been an increased pressure to establish high-performance systems that can monitor energy consumption and costs to develop more efficient facilities. Therefore, benchmarking has continually been recognized as an ideal resource to ensure performance, enabling a building to rake in comprehensive data relating to opportunities, gaps, and performance, and effectively carrying out the outcomes. It is important to note that financial performance of companies tend to suffer if their resources and funds are wasted because of energy inefficiency.

Energy Benchmarking for Performance Evaluation

Looking into the reasons why benchmarking is essential in measuring energy performance among facilities managers, this process helps in not only evaluating the performance but in creating the necessary trends and planning activities to be implemented in the future.

Energy Benchmarking for Reducing Costs and Adding Value

Energy benchmarking can help facility managers reduce costs and save money because they obtain information as to how much energy is being consumed. If facility managers understand this, they can easily identify opportunities for savings and potential rebates.

The process of energy benchmarking also allows facility managers to reduce operating costs, giving buildings a higher value for their owners while possibly generating marketing opportunities for occupiers. Energy benchmarking brings on even more benefits through the creation of local jobs as it supports the energy efficiency industry. It even touches on the aspect of health, particularly through the reduction of hazardous pollutants.

Energy Benchmarking for Training Programs

Benchmarks for maintaining and repairing buildings are not enough. It is similarly crucial to benchmark data that can contribute to training programs for skills improvement and increased occupant awareness. By effectively training your staff members and instilling proper occupant behavior in terms of responsible energy use, these can result to reduction of energy consumption on a yearly basis.


Benchmarking remains a continuous process to ensure improvements in facility management. This can aid organizations in determining the exact improvements needed to attain and sustain high-quality performance.

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