Alarm Management

I’ve been working on alarm management for almost 30 years now. Have we solved the problem? No. It’s a difficult problem to solve. It took us years to create the problem. Just to give you an example, when I first started in the industry, it was pretty common to only have 72 alarms on an operating unit. Today we see units with 40,000 alarms, and the operators are just getting too many. How do we solve that problem?

Over the years with the research I’ve done, we’ve created guidelines, and now we’ve produced standards like the ISA standard and the IEC standard on alarm management. Each of those standards guides a company into creating an alarm philosophy. For our customers, we’ve created a template, which is probably 80% of the solution that you need for an alarm philosophy. Then we come on site and spend a week talking about alarm management and about the unique things that impact you. We then update that philosophy to be specific to your site and your needs.