The key principles of CALM consist of setting-up a lean management structure and associated policies, building a foundation for continuous improvement through a healthy reliance on computational efficiency, and communicating all needed information openly. This starts with requirements for high-quality data and information about how the company works and ends with development of an Integrated System Model of the entire business entity. Much of the data already exist within a company but are rarely used for decision-making purposes, except perhaps for incident investigations or management-initiated special studies. For these and new data sources to be used properly, additional principles have to be incorporated into the firm’s objectives to make this information useful for the enterprise. Following are the more demanding principles for field industries that are usually not covered in books on lean management for manufacturing:

• Enter data once and only once
• Capture accurate data in a timely fashion at the source
• Get data in a usable and accurate form
• Develop efficient historical repositories, or data warehouses, for future use by anyone needing access to the data
• Innovations in software are encouraged by anyone in the organization
• Develop user-defined applications
• Make all applications available for continuous modification and improvement by the users
• Develop business applications using an iterative lean software development methodology
• Drive toward the elimination of free-form uses of e-mail and spreadsheets for the routine collection and dissemination of data
• Properly measure the effectiveness of work done on assets to determine if it was successful or detrimental
• Create resiliency in customer energy usage through software intelligence
• Create distributed intelligence in the organization and systems
• Create one ISM that can eventually run the entire company
• Use system engineering and R&D personnel on all integrated process teams