Despite the industrial sector accounts for about a quarter of total final consumption worldwide and great efforts have been carried out to reduce its energy use in the last decades, there are still substantial opportunities to improve industrial energy efficiency. Among those opportunities, energy management systems (EMSs) are one of the most successful and cost-effective ways to significantly reduce energy use, energy costs and environmental impact without affecting production and quality. This paper describes the development of an energy management system for a naphtha reforming plant by the use of a data mining approach. The paper shows how these techniques have been applied to identify key influence variables on energy consumption and to develop an energy performance model of the plant. Energy baseline and energy targets have been derived for the assessment of achieved and potential energy savings. Plant results show how savings may be achieved after the implementation of the EMS by tracking and adjusting performance against energy targets. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.