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June 2021 / 41 COMPRESSED AIR — PART II: COMPRESSED-AIR SYSTEM AUDITS Part I of this article, which appeared in PBE's May issue, discussed reframing your facility's compressed-air issues with a return on investment in mind to avoid unnecessary expenditures. Part II describes what a compressed-air system audit entails and how it can help you identify issues in your system and prioritize solutions. Paul Edwards and Mauricio Uribe, Compressed Air Consultants almost automatically guarantees that money that your company or plant could use elsewhere will be left on the table. Rather than passively seeking proposals for an audit, you should define for potential bidders your minimum expectations for the audit while allowing those bidders to offer additional ideas you may not have thought of. Having clear objectives In most audit inquiries we receive, the company's goals are muddled. Often, there's a single underlying issue driving the desire for an audit — the pain of work- arounds has become so bad that something finally needs to be done. Most compressed-air systems aren't managed effi- ciently, but by being proactive and engaging both your equipment and service suppliers, you can build an air audit road map to lower costs. If you don't have a clear understanding of all the potential goals a project could achieve, there's nothing wrong with asking for help in developing the scope of work when searching for an audit provider. The scope of work is an agreement about the work to be performed on a project. If you have a singular goal, such as ensuring that new pro- duction equipment won't tax the existing system, then it's more than reasonable to limit the scope of work even though that might have a lower return on invest- ment (ROI). ROI measures the amount of money spent on maintaining a major financial investment in relation to the investment's original implementation costs. This information is then used as a performance measure to determine the investment's efficiency. Therefore, it makes sense to define the audit with a goal of reducing costs in any of these questionable areas where it may be possible. The plant should define its specific goals in each of these areas and then require the A compressed-air system audit is the first step in eliminating waste and inefficiencies in your compressed-air system. An air audit should be a comprehensive look at all costs associated with a particular facility's compressed-air system and how those costs can be reduced. In this way, an air audit is a road map for how the plant's air system should evolve in both the short term and the long term. It's often said that a well-formulated question amounts to 50 percent of the answer. If you or your compressor supplier don't know the right questions to ask during a compressed-air audit (starting with what you want the audit to accomplish), the audit results may not be particularly helpful (and probably won't solve any of your compressed-air issues). A compressed-air system audit should be performed by an experienced, professional auditor, who knows how to identify a sys- tem's vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in order to lay out a prioritized action plan that effectively tackles their root cause and exploits cost-reduction opportunities. Without an audit, many plants will opt to purchase additional compressors to address a compressed-air problem, but this requires additional capital, installa- tion, energy, and maintenance costs while failing to address or eliminate the problem's root cause. An air audit also provides the knowledge a plant requires to make better business decisions concerning its compressed-air supply at all levels. Most of the engineered waste (waste from deliberate initiatives created by compressed-air users to work around a real issue) arises from a lack of understanding of the problem at hand. At the same time, ignorance of actual compressed-air costs prevents companies from looking at more efficient, alternative solutions. Unfortunately, for many companies, an air audit is whatever an expert tells you it is. This approach