A Lasting Plan for Alarm Management

By Ian Nimmo and Stephen Maddox | Aug 18, 2015
Summary: A well-written alarm management philosophy defines procedures that allow your team to get alarms under control now and for the long haul.

Alarm management seems to be a never-ending task: company X hires consultant Y to repair their badly designed and overloaded alarm management system for $1 million, and then 18 months later the same company is searching for a different vendor to help them with their poorly designed and overloaded alarm management system.

Many companies start out on the right track. They hear that standards and guidelines like EEMUA 191 talk about a lifecycle model, and the first step in that model is an alarm philosophy document. So they pay someone to write an alarm philosophy document, but when it’s complete, it’s useless to the alarm rationalization process because it doesn’t tell how to address common issues that can save time and have a very big impact…[ read full article ]

The full UCDS article was published in Control Magazine.