It seems like everyone is talking about alarm system rationalization or re-engineering projects these days. And why not? Investigations have shown that abnormal conditions and poor alarm management can cost a facility up to 8% of total throughput.* But sometimes these rationalization projects have trouble getting off the ground. Management worries about whether the costs will outweigh the benefits. And in today’s world of lean companies there may not be the time or personnel to do this investigation and re-engineering.
A quick and easy step is available to justify the alarm rationalization project. And that step is the installation of an on-line alarm auditing tool.In a “no-time” environment, an alarm auditing tool can tell you where the opportunities are and how much payback there might be for your company. An effective application will provide immediate metrics on: • When or if operators are being swamped• If nuisance conditions are a problem• The frequency of critical alarms including Top 10Measuring the magnitude of the problem is the first step in determining potential payback. Initial investigations often reveal questions about why specific tags are in alarm and what their potential impact is on productivity.
One such application is AlarmAnalyst®. Using this software, anyone can quickly determine where the plant stands against best practices in alarm management. Interactive displays provides immediate information on:• Overall alarm rates and their frequencies• Total alarm duration and standing alarm totals• Burst rates, Top 10 alarms and graphical Sequence of Events • Devices in which operators are spending a lot of time manually controlling Advance capabilities also include pattern recognition to weed out process relationships, cross correlation and complete integration of process trend data from process historians. “We view alarms as process inefficiencies and often see customers achieving 90% reduction in alarm rates” states Jon Dun, lead engineer at Machine Automation Inc.
“This has an enormous effect on improving working conditions for operators as well as providing increased levels of plant safety and throughput”.Machine Automation is a developer of plant optimization and auditing software.For more information on AlarmAnalyst® and Machine Automation, please visit our website: www.machineautomation.org .
