Digitalisation: ISA-18.2 and the future of Alarm Management

Alarm Management control panel
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Digitalisation: ISA-18.2 and the future of Alarm Management
JAMES FOX
OCTOBER 2024
Introduction
Alarm management is a cornerstone of safe and efficient industrial operations. The ISA-18.2 standard, developed by the International Society of Automation, gives us a structured approach to managing alarms in the process industry. As the digital age continues to evolve, we’re exploring how digitalisation can assist or even revolutionise alarm management, with multiple stakeholders contributing to these efforts. In this blog, I’ll explore the fundamentals of ISA-18.2 and examine how the ongoing exploration of digitalisation is being shaped by active contributions from industry experts.
Woman at control centre using ProcessVue alarm management software
The Basics of ISA-18.2
ISA-18.2, officially titled “Management of Alarm Systems for the Process Industries,” was introduced in 2009 and has since become the industry benchmark for alarm management. The standard outlines a comprehensive lifecycle for alarm systems, focusing on key principles such as:

  • 1 - 1. Alarm Rationalisation

    Streamlining alarm systems by analysing and categorising alarms to minimise unnecessary alerts.

  • 2 - Alarm Prioritisation

    Prioritising alarms based on their criticality to ensure that operators can focus on the most significant issues.

  • 3 - Alarm Suppression

    Temporarily suppressing alarms under specific conditions to prevent alarm floods and operator overload.

  • 4 - Operator Response

    Establishing clear, actionable responses for each alarm to enable timely and effective intervention.

These principles have been instrumental in guiding the industry towards safer and more efficient operations. However, as technology advances, the exploration of digitalisation within the ISA-18.2 framework is gathering momentum, with key industry members actively contributing to this evolution.
Digitalisation in Alarm Management: A New Frontier
Digitalisation, the integration of digital technologies into existing processes, promises to enhance alarm management by enabling greater automation, data-driven insights, and operational efficiency. Within the context of ISA-18.2, digitalisation is still in its exploratory phase, but several promising use cases are emerging, driven by leading alarm management specialists like ProcessVue and other industry experts:

  • 1 - Enhanced Alarm Rationalisation

    Digital tools embodying master alarm databases can automate aspects of the alarm rationalisation process. With the ability to embed key portions of your alarm philosophy documentation they help to enforce standardised and consistent approaches to alarm management.

  • 2 - Advanced Data Analytics

    By applying big data and machine learning, digitalised alarm management systems can detect patterns and trends that may not be visible to human operators. This capability could lead to more accurate alarm predictions and early detection of potential issues.

  • 3 - Improved Operator Responses

    Master alarm databases being integrated with HMI’s providing operators with important information about alarms directly in the HMI, such as the authorised responses to alarms and the consequences of missing them.

  • 4 - Insight and reviews of operator actions

    Digitalised alarm management systems providing collaborative environments to facilitate the recording and reviews of operator actions, helping to identify additional operator training opportunities.

  • 5 - Dynamic Alarm Management

    Traditional alarm systems are often static, with predefined thresholds. Digitalisation introduces dynamic alarm management, where settings can be adjusted in real-time based on current operating conditions, reducing nuisance alarms and improving efficiency.

Alarm Management control panel
Active Contributions to Standards and Validation

As digitalisation efforts progress, multiple members of the process industry, including ProcessVue, are actively contributing to the development and refinement of alarm management standards and technical reports. Our involvement ensures that the exploration of digitalisation is grounded in practical, real-world applications. By validating emerging use cases and sharing insights from our operational experiences, we help shape the direction of standards like ISA-18.2.

Our contributions are not just theoretical; they are based on rigorous testing and validation of digital technologies in real-world environments. This collaborative approach helps ensure that digitalised alarm management solutions are effective, reliable, and aligned with industry needs. It also provides a feedback loop that allows us to refine our practices continuously, incorporating the latest innovations while adhering to the core principles of ISA-18.2.

Challenges and Considerations
While digitalisation offers significant potential, it also presents challenges that must be addressed:

  • Data Security

    As digitalisation increases data collection and analysis, ensuring robust cybersecurity measures is critical to protect sensitive information.

  • Interoperability

    Integrating digital tools with existing systems can be complex. Ensuring that new solutions are compatible with legacy systems is essential for a smooth transition.

  • Standardised Data

    Alarm data must be standardised to allow consistent analysis of data across multiple systems and sites

  • Human Factors

    Digitalisation should complement, not replace, human decision-making. Training operators to effectively use new digital tools is crucial for success.

The Future of Alarm Management

As digitalisation continues to evolve, the ISA-18.2 standard is expected to incorporate new technologies, guided by the contributions of industry experts. This collaborative effort will ensure that digitalised alarm management solutions are safe, effective, and aligned with industry best practices.

Organisations looking to stay ahead should begin exploring digitalisation opportunities within their alarm management systems, engage with industry forums, and contribute to the ongoing development of standards. Our active participation in these efforts ensures that we are not only adapting to change but also helping to drive it.

Conclusion

The digitalisation of alarm management represents a significant opportunity for the process industry. By integrating advanced analytics, dynamic management, and remote monitoring, digitalisation can enhance operational efficiency, safety, and reliability. However, this journey is just beginning, and it requires careful consideration of challenges and implications.

Our active contributions to the development of alarm management standards like ISA-18.2 ensure that these new technologies are validated and refined in real-world settings. By staying engaged with these efforts, organisations can leverage the full potential of digitalised alarm management and contribute to shaping the future of the industry.

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Boosting Efficiency with Alarm Definition Templates in Alarm Rationalisation and Documentation

Viewing alarm definition templates
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Boosting Efficiency with Alarm Definition Templates in Alarm Rationalisation and Documentation
JAMES FOX
SEPTEMBER 2024
With the increasing complexity of processes, the number of alarms in any given system has skyrocketed. Managing these alarms efficiently is a significant challenge that demands a well-structured approach. One of the most effective strategies in achieving this is the use of alarm definition templates. These templates, which allow you to save supporting alarm information, play a crucial role in alarm rationalisation and documentation. This blog will explore how leveraging these templates can significantly enhance operational efficiency
Viewing alarm definition templates
The Role of Alarm Rationalisation

Alarm rationalisation is the process of reviewing and assessing each alarm to ensure it is necessary, appropriately configured, and that it adds value to the operator’s decision-making process. During this process, each alarm is scrutinised to determine whether it should be active, its appropriate priority, and the conditions under which it should trigger.

Alarm rationalisation is a critical step in preventing alarm overload, where operators are saturated with too many alarms, leading to desensitisation and the potential for critical alarms to be missed. By rationalising alarms, organisations can significantly reduce the number of unnecessary alarms, improve operator response times, and ultimately enhance safety and efficiency.

Understanding Alarm Definition Templates

Before diving into the benefits, it’s essential to understand what alarm definition templates are. Essentially, these templates are standardised information sets that capture all necessary information about an alarm. This information typically includes the alarm’s supporting information including, priority, potential causes, operator actions, and any other relevant details. The purpose of these templates is to improve the efficiency of alarm rationalisation and enable a consistent and complete approach in how alarm types are defined, managed, and documented across the entire system.

How Alarm Definition Templates Enhance Efficiency
Click image to enlarge
How Alarm Definition Templates Enhance Efficiency
Supporting actions in alarm rationalisation workshops are the tasks that ensure the smooth execution of the workshop and the implementation of its outcomes. These include:
1. Standardisation and Consistency

  • One of the primary benefits of alarm definition templates is that they promote standardisation of alarm types. By using a consistent format for defining alarms, you ensure that all alarms of a specific type across the system are documented in the same way. This consistency is crucial for effective alarm management, as it reduces the likelihood of errors and omissions that can occur when alarms are documented ad hoc.

  • Standardisation also makes it easier for operators and engineers to understand and respond to alarms. When each alarm is defined using the same template, there is no ambiguity about what the alarm means or what actions should be taken. This clarity can lead to faster and more accurate responses, reducing downtime and improving overall system performance.

2. Streamlined Documentation Process

  • Documenting alarms manually can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. Alarm definition templates streamline this process by providing a predefined structure for capturing all relevant information for the associated alarm type. This not only saves time but also ensures that no critical details are overlooked.

  • Furthermore, having a comprehensive and well-organised documentation system is invaluable during audits or reviews. With alarm definition templates, all the necessary information is readily available and easy to navigate, making the documentation process much more efficient.

3. Improved Alarm Rationalisation

  • During the alarm rationalisation process, having well-documented alarms is crucial. Alarm definition templates provide a clear and detailed record of each alarm type, making it easier to evaluate whether the alarm is necessary and correctly configured.

  • The templates also facilitate collaboration among team members during the rationalisation process. When all relevant information is captured in a standardised format, it becomes easier for different stakeholders to review and discuss the alarm's configuration and potential impact. This collaborative approach can lead to more informed decision-making and more effective alarm management strategies.

Conclusion
In conclusion, alarm definition templates are a powerful tool in the quest for operational efficiency. By promoting standardisation, streamlining documentation, enhancing the alarm rationalisation process, and supporting continuous improvement, these templates help organisations manage alarms more effectively and efficiently. Investing in a robust system of alarm definition templates is not just a good practice—it’s a strategic imperative for any organisation looking to optimise its operations and maintain a competitive edge.
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Building Blocks of Success: Ensuring Each Workshop Advances Your Alarm Rationalisation Goals

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Building Blocks of Success:
Ensuring Each Workshop Advances Your Alarm Rationalisation Goals
JAMES FOX
AUGUST 2024
Alarms are a key component of industrial operations, helping to keep processes safe and efficient. However, when alarm systems are cluttered with poorly configured alarms they can lead to confusion, inefficiencies and even accidents.
This is where alarm rationalisation comes into play. A systematic approach to reviewing and documenting alarms to enhance their usefulness for operators, enabling better management of abnormal situations. To successfully conduct an alarm rationalisation improvement project, a series of supporting actions are essential. Managing these actions efficiently can make the difference between a successful outcome and an overwhelming one. Enter ProcessVue Guardian’s new action list, a tool designed to streamline and enhance the management of these supporting actions.
Understanding Alarm Rationalisation Workshops
Alarm rationalisation workshops are collaborative sessions where operators, engineers and safety engineers come together to review, evaluate and optimise alarm settings. The primary goal is to ensure that every alarm is justified, necessary, and configured correctly to provide clear and actionable information to operators. This process involves several steps:

  • 1 - Reviewing Existing Alarms

    Analysing current alarm settings to identify redundant, unnecessary, or poorly configured alarms.

  • 2 - Classifying Alarms

    Determining the priority and function of each alarm to ensure they align with operational and safety requirements.

  • 3 - Defining Alarm Limits

    Establishing thresholds and setpoints that trigger alarms, ensuring they are neither too sensitive nor too lenient.

  • 4 - Documenting Rationalisation Decisions

    Keeping a detailed record of the rationale behind each alarm's configuration and priority.

  • 5 - Training and Implementation

    Ensuring that operators understand the changes and can effectively respond to alarms as intended.

Each of these steps generates its own set of supporting actions, from data collection and analysis to stakeholder engagement and training. Managing these actions efficiently is critical to the success of the workshop and the overall effectiveness of the alarm system.
The Role of Supporting Actions
Supporting actions in alarm rationalisation workshops are the tasks that ensure the smooth execution of the workshop and the implementation of its outcomes. These include:

  • Data Gathering

    Collecting historical alarm data, operator feedback, and system performance metrics.

  • Stakeholder Engagement

    Coordinating with different departments, such as operations, maintenance, and safety, to gather input and ensure alignment.

  • Analysis and Reporting

    Analysing data to identify trends and issues, then reporting findings to the workshop participants.

  • Documentation

    Recording decisions made during the workshop, including the rationale behind each alarm's configuration.

  • Follow-up Actions

    Scheduling further reviews, updates to documentation, or additional training sessions as needed and implementing alarm configuration updates based on agreed changes.

These supporting actions can quickly accumulate, creating a complex web of tasks that need to be managed carefully to avoid delays, omissions, or errors.
How ProcessVue Guardian’s New Action List Enhances Management
Click image to enlarge

How it makes a difference:

  • 1 - Centralised Task Management

    ProcessVue Guardian’s action list provides a centralised platform where all supporting actions can be logged, tracked, and managed. This centralisation ensures that nothing falls through the cracks and that every task is accounted for.

  • 2 - Prioritisation and Assignment

    The action list allows users to prioritise tasks based on urgency and importance, and to assign them to specific team members. This clarity in task ownership helps distribute the workload evenly and ensures that everyone knows their responsibilities.

  • 3 - Real-time Updates

    As tasks are completed or updated, the action list can be updated to reflect these changes.

  • 4 - Integrated Communication

    ProcessVue Guardian’s action list facilitates communication by allowing users to comment on tasks, comments can take the form of questions, and information updates directly within the platform. This reduces the need for external communication and keeps all relevant information in one place.

  • 5 - Tracking and Reporting

    The action list offers robust tracking features, allowing stakeholders to monitor progress and identify bottlenecks. This visibility is crucial for keeping the workshop on track and ensuring that all necessary actions are completed.

  • 6 - Audit Trail

    Every action, comment, and update within the action list is automatically logged, creating a comprehensive audit trail. This is invaluable for compliance purposes and for reviewing the effectiveness of the alarm rationalisation process over time.

ProcessVue Guardian’s new action list is a game-changer for managing the supporting actions involved in alarm rationalisation workshops.
Conclusion

Alarm rationalisation workshops are essential for optimising alarm systems, but they involve a wide range of supporting actions that must be carefully managed to ensure success. ProcessVue Guardian’s new action list provides a powerful tool for organising, tracking, and executing these tasks, helping teams to streamline their processes, reduce errors, and achieve their alarm management goals more effectively.

By leveraging ProcessVue Guardian’s action list, organisations can enhance the efficiency of their alarm rationalisation workshops, ultimately leading to safer, more reliable operations. The future of alarm management is not just about refining alarms themselves, but also about refining the processes that support those alarms—and ProcessVue Guardian’s new action list is leading the way.

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A New Era in Alarm Response and Governance

ProcessVue - Alarm Response and Governance
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A New Era in Alarm Response and Governance
JAMES FOX
JUNE 2024
Control room operators are essential for the smooth and safe operation of critical systems, requiring a blend of technical knowledge, vigilance, problem-solving skills, and effective communication. Their role is vital in ensuring that operations run efficiently, safely, and in compliance with all relevant standards and regulations.

When abnormal situations occur, control room operators are tasked with taking corrective action to avert the abnormal situation. Which can range from a simple action such as opening a valve to complex multi-step procedures depending on the situation at hand.

Sounds simple enough until you factor in the number of alarms a site can have configured, a thousand? ten thousand? Or more. That’s a lot of responses to remember. An operator’s experience will carry them so far, enabling them to store a set of responses for the regular alarms, but it’s the less frequent alarms that will cause problems.

ProcessVue - Alarm Response and Governance

This is where operator training on alarm responses can help operators to take the correct actions in a timely manner. With the advent of Master Alarm Databases businesses are creating databases of their alarms, storing the configurations and adding the supporting information as defined in the alarm management standard (ISA-18.2) such as the cause of the alarm, the consequence of missing and the required operator actions for responding to the alarm.

Thanks to Master Alarm Databases businesses now have a single place to find all of the information about their approved alarms, and operators have access to reference materials and alarm response manuals to help them manage those alarms. Add to this regular alarm response training and operators should be well placed to manage those alarms and take appropriate action against them. All that’s missing is the ability to record and review the operators’ actions in response to the alarms.  Without this information it’s a challenge to assess how operators are performing, making it difficult to provide additional support and training when deviations from procedures occur. This is an area where the ProcessVue Analyser and the shift worklist can help.

ProcessVue Analyser is an alarm historian that connects to SCADA and DCS systems, capable of capturing the sequence of events as they occur, it provides alarm analytics helping you to understand your alarm management challenges. It now also includes a shift worklist, part of the worklists additional module. The shift worklist is designed to help you keep track of alarms and associated operator actions taken during a shift.

ProcessVue Analyser dashboard
Alarms can be added to the shift worklist and assigned to responsible people who can document the actions they take in response to alarms. When a shift ends any open alarms can be transferred to a new shift for continuity. The completed shifts, along with the alarms and any comments or recorded actions are stored in the database for future review. The shift worklist also features an approval workflow which when used in conjunction with the alarm response manual or other set of documented operating procedures, can be used to demonstrate operator competence and help identify additional operator training opportunities.

How it works
The first step to using the shift worklist is to determine your shift patterns. When using the shift worklist for the first time you will be required to create a shift worklist, designating the start and end time of a shift, this range becomes part of a shift pattern and is used to create future shifts

Shift Worklist Feature
The next step is to add alarms as they occur during the shift. If an alarm occurs multiple times during the shift, the worklist will compress the occurrences into a single instance of the alarm making it easy to record actions and observations against it, regardless of how many times it may occur during the shift.
ProcessVue admin page

Once added to the worklist, the alarms can be assigned to operators who can record actions and observations regarding the alarms and when an alarm has been dealt with, it can be marked as complete.

When a shift ends, the current shift worklist can be closed and the worklist enters an approval state, where a user with the relevant permissions can log in and approve the actions, comments, and observations made in response to the alarms. The reviewer can also add additional comments to the alarms during the review stage.

Once reviewed, the worklist is archived in the ProcessVue database and can be accessed later through the shift worklist’s selection option.

Having an audit trail of actions taken by operators against alarms during a shift and being able to compare those actions with alarm response manuals or other existing operating procedures allows us to identify deviations from official responses, paving the way for further support and learning opportunities for operators and helps demonstrates good working practices.

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Alarm Enrichment with Metadata

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Alarm Enrichment with Metadata
JAMES FOX
MAY 2024
Alarms exemplify an area ripe for digitalisation, offering numerous tangible benefits. Consider a water company utilising alarm data to track incidents contributing to environmental breaches of consent, enabling them to sidestep potential fines, or optimising their alarms to reduce expensive callouts to remote facilities. Similarly, a pharmaceutical company could leverage alarm data to uphold product quality standards in pursuit of the perfect batch. Meanwhile, operators overseeing offshore assets might utilise alarm data to identify the stroking of ESD valves, thereby reducing the duration of planned shutdowns.

Despite the potential rewards, why do we not see more companies harnessing their alarm data in unique and innovative ways?

One plausible explanation lies in the fundamental purpose of alarms which is: to alert operators to abnormal situations. As a result, alarm messages are typically crafted with elements that serve this core objective, promptly notifying operators of potential issues. These messages typically comprise a unique identifier, a description, a status, a priority, and other pertinent attributes to inform operators about the issue at hand.

To fully leverage alarm data in a digitalisation strategy, it’s imperative to tailor alarms for their intended audience and purpose. This necessitates retooling alarms to ensure they are easily digestible and relevant across different facets of the business. For instance, a water company seeking to centralise operations for cost reduction and deeper insights may face challenges when trying to discern the source of alarms generated across various sites. Here, the incorporation of metadata proves invaluable. By appending location information such as, region, site name, or other categorisation data to alarm and events, companies can effortlessly identify the source of each alarm, facilitating streamlined operations.

Crucially, it’s vital not to compromise the functionality of alarms that are essential for operators managing abnormal situations. This underscores the importance of leveraging alarm historian tools like ProcessVue to add metadata seamlessly. ProcessVue employs Comma Separated Value (CSV) lookup files to augment alarms with additional metadata, provided there exists a unique identifier within the messages.

A single line in the CSV file can be used to add multiple fields to your alarm and event data. The image below depicts an alarm enrichment CSV file containing location data that would help a water company understand where their alarms are generated and by what equipment.

A single line in the CSV file can be used to add multiple fields to your alarm and event data

In this example the water company could aggregate their alarm data with confidence knowing they can pinpoint exactly where the alarm originated and what piece of equipment generated the alarm.

Below is an example of the enriched alarm data with the new information on display.

an example of the enriched alarm data with the new information on display.

Enriched alarm data opens avenues for unlocking new analytical capabilities. For instance, companies can identify failing equipment, monitor alarm frequencies based on groups, or analyse alarm demographics by category. The potential applications for enhanced alarm management with metadata are virtually limitless, ranging from monitoring environmental alarms to identifying ESD valves to help streamline operations on oil platforms.

Incorporating metadata into alarms represents a significant leap forward in enhancing their functionality and utility. By providing context, personalisation, prioritisation, integration, and analytical insights, metadata transforms alarms from mere notifications into intelligent tools that empower continuous improvement processes and help drive efficiency and productivity.

Watch the video below to learn more about implementing alarm enrichment features in ProcessVue Analyser 4.0′.

Do more with your data!

Play Video about implementing alarm enrichment features in ProcessVue Analyser 4.0
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Your Alarm Management Journey – Let’s Get Started!

Your Alarm Management Journey
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Your Alarm Management Journey – Let’s Get Started!
Laurent Bourrouilhou
DECEMBER 2023
Alarm Management. A lot consider it as the weak link of modern industrial systems, but it’s undoubtedly an area where companies can get valuable return on investment relatively easily. Here, we cover how companies can get started on their journey to alarm management excellence.
Your Alarm Management Journey
Alarm systems have a purpose: making sure that a process doesn’t get into abnormal situations that are not only a potential hazard but could also result in quality issues, equipment damage and unplanned downtime. And it’s not just about profits. It’s also about people. Because a good alarm system allows for:
  • Faster training of operators
  • Better working conditions
  • Better employee retention

However, the prospect of cleaning up an alarm system, or “rationalising an alarm system” (as people familiar with alarm management would say) can be seen as a daunting and costly task which often ends up being postponed.

Without rationalising, the inefficiency of the alarm system will contribute to a reactive management of your operations year after year, meaning automatic shutdowns and the triggering of safety systems become common practice.

Of course, alarm management excellence is a long journey, but, as with every journey, what matters is to get started and to keep walking at a comfortable pace, because every step will provide tangible results. Alarm Management is after all a journey, not a destination!

Analysing Alarm Management data

There are two routes aspiring companies looking to take back control of their alarms can take. They can enlist the assistance of an experienced alarm management software provider (AMS) or form an alarm management taskforce within the company. Both routes are viable. One will provide a fast track to getting your alarms under control, whereas the in-house route will involve learning experiences and will take a more scenic approach, learning as they go.

Whichever route is taken though, the journey will follow the same path:

  • Step 1 - A review of your alarm philosophy document

    The starting point to getting your alarms under control should be with a review of your alarm philosophy document. If you don’t have one, you should seriously consider implementing one. It’s the foundation for a successful implementation of alarm management, setting out the key principles required for designing, implementing, and maintaining an alarm system. It serves as a reference guide for all personnel involved in the alarm management process and also helps to ensure that alarms are used effectively and efficiently, and that they do not contribute to overloading the operator with alarms. If you have one, it should be reviewed to ensure that it is relevant to your site, to your operations and that it is up to date with the latest revision of the alarm management standards and guidelines.

  • Step 2 - Measure your alarm system performance

    To plan alarm management improvement activities, it is important to take stock of where you currently reside on the alarm management spectrum. This involves acquiring alarm management software such as ProcessVue Analyser which will enable you to benchmark your alarm system against the alarm management industry standards and guidelines (ISA-18.2, EEMUA191 and IEC62682). It will provide focus, allowing you to tackle your problem areas such as chattering and fleeting alarms and will help ensure you get the most success from your actions. The results of this step will then go on to form the base line with which to measure the success of your alarm management improvement activities.

  • Step 3 - Start working on your most frequent alarms

    Through generating most frequent reports at a regular cadence (weekly, fortnightly, or monthly) you can identify nuisance alarms and take action to reduce them – this could involve addressing maintenance issues, or resetting the parameters which trigger them. It should not be understated what this simple process can do to help reduce the overall alarm load on your operators. ProcessVue Analyser is equipped with nuisance alarm activity worklists enabling you to assign nuisance alarms to responsible personnel who can track their remediation activities within the software. This provides two benefits: it allows you to demonstrate a continuous improvement process through the audit trail, and it acts as a knowledge base allowing you to reduce mean time to repair on repeat offenders.

  • Step 4 - Look for relationships and patterns

    Over time, with the volume of alarms being reduced through nuisance alarm remediation you will be presented with the opportunity to start looking for relationships between alarms and patterns in the reports, matching those patterns to what else is happening in the environment, such as an unidentified problem with a pump causing issues under certain load conditions. By recognising the changes in alarm loads, it is possible to identify potential causes and organise appropriate remedial action and apply advanced alarm handling techniques. These steps can set the operator on a course towards taking their system from its default configuration, which was set when the system was commissioned, on towards a bespoke system, tuned to the requirements of your operation, further fine-tuned by the realities of operation. Again, those familiar with alarm management will know this as documentation and rationalisation of alarms. A Master Alarm Database which provides an efficient route to rationalisation and documentation is desired here, especially when dealing with hundreds or thousands of alarms. A good Master Alarm Database application like ProcessVue Guardian will provide batch editing functionality allowing you to effect changes across hundreds or thousands of alarms in a single pass, while the workflow will ensure all changes are approved before being deployed.

Alarm Management Dashboard
Guardian’s welcome screen with the list of on-going projects and their completion status

Learn more about ProcessVue Guardian

The benefit of undertaking these simple steps should not be underestimated, but for those companies tackling alarm management as part of a digital transformation approach, it’s good to have help from alarm management professionals who can not only streamline this process and offer the benefit of their experience but can also help you to develop a more effective alarm management philosophy.

Productivity features and the ability to split the work into chunks that can be completed fast is our contribution to the “journey” – helping to keep teams motivated, probably the key success factor of an alarm management project.

Fast and visible results demonstrate to the stakeholders at every level in the organisation that poor alarm management can be addressed, step by step.

How do you eat an elephant? Bite after bite!

So… let’s get started!

Alarm Management - Let’s get started!
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Make Your Alarm Management Software Work for You (Not the Opposite)

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Make Your Alarm Management Software Work for You (Not the Other Way Around)
IAN BROWN
AUGUST 2023

There are many good reasons for investing in alarm management software that go beyond helping to meet compliance requirements or simply reporting to the board. Operationally, alarm management software can help reduce operator workload, identify problematic equipment, and aid in incident investigation. From a control and maintenance perspective, it can help consolidate alarm and event data from disparate systems into a single, easy-to-manage environment, while also making it possible to benchmark your processes against global standards and focus maintenance on problem areas. And at the enterprise level, it can help to improve plant performance by reducing downtime as well as making it possible to analyse and identify best practices across different lines or plants that do similar things.

The business case then, is straight forward – alarm management software helps make enterprises more profitable and eases the compliance burden. So it might surprise you to read that when I speak with plant personnel responsible for using alarm management software, they often say that they only open it once a month to produce a report for senior management.

Many users simply aren’t getting the value they should be from their alarm management software, and this means that many companies are missing opportunities to improve their outcomes.

A stitch in time…
The best approach to alarm management and the one employed by best-in-class users is to make it part of your day, every day. It doesn’t have to be onerous – in fact, by bringing alarm management into the daily routine, you can make your software work much harder for you. By using your alarm management software to identify and resolve alarm-related issues quickly, your operators’ working environment will improve, and they will be less stressed, and less likely to make potentially costly mistakes. Your operators will also be able to move from a reactive approach where they spend their time responding to and servicing alarms, to a more proactive approach where they can monitor and adjust the process to improve operations. This means fewer process interruptions and potentially, fewer regulatory breaches. Needless to say, the plant will also be more productive, and therefore more profitable too.
4 simple steps to good alarm management

  • 1 - Understand and use the features of your alarm management software better

    This may sound obvious but understanding the capability of your software is a quick route to extracting value from it. For example, a good alarm management software suite will have reporting capabilities built in – such as is the case with ProcessVue Analyser. A tool like this makes it possible to automate and email out a customised daily report of alarms.

  • 2 - Add alarm management to your morning meeting

    Often, morning meetings focus on production targets, losses and challenges, product/grade changes and maintenance issues. But you should also be discussing alarms. By adding alarm issues to your daily agenda and keeping them there, you will gain better control, reduce the stress of managing alarms and reduce the likelihood of alarm-related issues and avoidable failures. It goes without saying that unresolved alarm management issues, or important alarms that are missed because they were masked by nuisance alarms, are likely to take up a lot more time in morning meetings if they result in downtime, so the daily time investment is thoroughly worthwhile. At the very least, review frequently occurring alarms – say the top 10, top 5, or any alarm with more than 500 activations in 24hrs? Choose the criteria, set up the automated reporting, and relax, knowing that nothing is going to sneak up on you.

  • 3 - At every meeting, identify and agree what needs to be addressed, and track resolution in subsequent meetings

    As the primary alarm system users, your operators are the main beneficiaries of any alarm improvement initiative and are fundamental to its success. Without your operators’ positive engagement in the process, your alarm management journey is likely to falter. Tracking actions and resolutions is incredibly important. I have lost count of the number of operators I’ve spoken to who say they’ve reported alarm issues on multiple occasions, but nobody listens, and nothing gets done. If you routinely review, track, and resolve alarm problems, operators are much more likely and confident to speak up and issues can be nipped in the bud or avoided altogether. The reporting is also an opportunity to set your alarm management approach on a positive footing – teams can take pride in making improvements and productivity KPIs can be boosted.

  • 4 - Look to solve problems quickly where you can

    Identify quick wins in your most frequent alarms and deal with them - your operators will thank you. ProcessVue Analyser includes a tool as standard to help identify quick wins, which gives a graphical and tabular indication of alarm activation times. In the example below, the table and chart show that 100% of all activations of this Priority 1 alarm are less than 7 seconds in duration. Whilst this may be a genuine alarm condition if it persists, short duration activations which may, for example, be caused by waves or ripples on the liquid surface, don’t give an operator enough time to respond appropriately to the alarm, so could a 10-second timer be added to mitigate this nuisance?

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Finding and resolving issues like this is easy when your software is designed to help you.

It is not difficult or onerous to make alarm management a part of the daily routine and the benefits of unlocking the value of alarm management software are significant. Importantly, if you are not using your alarm management software to make sure it serves you, you’ll quickly realise that it is you who are serving your alarm management software – being inundated with alarms, investigating failures, and reacting to avoidable downtime.

If you feel that your alarm management software is bossing you, rather than the other way around, get in touch, or try the four steps above and let me know how you get on.

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