26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Energy and water consumptions are major cost points for large buildings, such as manufacturing plants, hospitals and office complexes. The drive for sustainability and efficiency, when considering energy and water usage in the building management sector, has resulted in the increased importance of the effective management of such resources. Hospitals are complex, resource intensive facilities, resulting in increased complexities when managing energy and water usage. In addition, there is a significant difference in the energy and water usage between hospitals. These differences are due to factors such as the demand, environmental characteristics, and capacity of a hospital, which greatly influence its energy and water usage. However, investigations suggest that comparisons of water and energy efficiency between hospitals are deficient without normalising for differences between hospitals. Normalisation of performance measures or benchmarks would enable more accurate comparison, and subsequently management, of resources in hospitals. Normalising the energy and water utilisation provides a means of determining a hospital’s current consumption efficiency, as well as identifying potential opportunities for efficiency improvement. The need for a management tool to normalise the energy and water usage across hospitals, and to subsequently determine the actual performance potential of a hospital’s energy and water consumption, is thus evident. This research follows a literature-based approach to i) identify the variables that contribute towards water and energy usage in hospitals, ii) establish the factors that contribute towards the differences between various hospitals’ energy and water use, and iii) to ultimately propose an approach for normalising the energy and water usage of hospitals. The approach will enable hospital management to determine the true energy and water performance potential of hospitals. A hospital is modelled as an aggregate of its functional units, the macro departments that make-up a hospital. A literature analysis was conducted to understand how energy and water are consumed within these functional units, and to identify methodologies for normalising the energy and water consumption of a hospital. Studying the factors affecting the energy and water consumption within the individual functional units, and analysing their overall effect on the consumption of the hospital, provides a means of comparing the energy and water consumption of hospitals that specialize in different activities. The proposed approach assesses the individual performance of functional units that form part of a hospital; and subsequently assesses the performance of the hospital as a whole,, namely all functional units. **This paper engages the technology management in developing countries theme of the conferences with emphasis on facility management.**