Business benchmarking of global operations: The case of water and energy consumption in the brewery industry

As the demand for, and cost of, resources increase, the brewing sector is increasingly at risk from a sustainability perspective. In response, brewers globally have embarked on efficiency improvement programs, often accompanied by ambitious, publicly committed targets. Benchmarks are then often used to assist brewers in identifying improvement opportunities, but a comparison of water and energy performances in breweries is deficient without normalizing for differences between plants. The normalization of water and energy use was subsequently investigated, by using SABMiller breweries as a case study; to propose variables (differences between plants), and a normalization model to enable breweries (that are different) to be compared for the purpose of benchmarking, and to identify improvement opportunities. Drivers of water, electricity, and thermal energy usage obtained from literature were selected, rationalized and ranked in a Delphi survey of industry experts, and correlated with data from 64 SABMiller sites. The main drivers identified and data from 58 SABMiller sites were utilized to develop multi-variable linear regression (MVLR) models of water, electricity, and thermal energy usage. The models, tested with data from 6 SABMiller sites of different hubs, were able to predict water, electrical, and thermal energy usage to within a 7% error, given the identified variables as inputs. By eliminating the variability in drivers within the control of brewery staff, the MVLR models were used to normalize the performance indices and enabled the direct comparisons between plants. It is shown that the range in usages is driven mostly by plant volume, and that much of the variability in water and energy usage performances are due to drivers within the control of plant and engineering personnel.