Full Range Alarm Management Services

Think you know UCDS?

Alarm Management

Myth: UCDS just develops alarm philosophies, right?

UCDS offers a full range of alarm management services helping our clients implement a high-performance alarm management system.

First of all, do you have a problem? It is more than just about KPIs, although we will take your alarm and event data and calculate these. Moreover, we can help you take a holistic look at your alarm management system and identify if you have a problem, where the problem areas are and prioritize a program of activities to address them.

It starts with training – making sure all alarm management stakeholders understand the principles of alarm management based on standards such as ANSI/ISA-18.02 and IEC 62682 and guidelines such as EEMUA-191 and API RP-1167. We have standard on-line and in person training classes as well as developing custom workshops for clients.

The next step is to develop an alarm philosophy document, a requirement of the ISA standard. We work with clients customizing our best practice philosophy in a workshop setting or work with an existing client document to bring it up to date. Many companies start off on a rationalization process without this document in place and end up with inconsistent, and often poor, alarm configuration, wasting financial and human resources.

There are two approached to rationalization, the first more traditional approach where your team meets to review all the alarms, for which we can provide a chairman to help facilitate the meetings. This tends to absorb a large amount of your resources, resources that are in short supply and in high demand. Alternatively, we can help reduce the impact on your resources through a pre-rationalization process, where our chemical engineers perform much of the work that is then reviewed and approved by your experts prior to implementation.

During this process we will work with you to determine which, if any, advanced alarm management techniques, such as conditional, state-based, or dynamic alarming, are applicable and ensure that this is accounted for during rationalization. The biggest waste of time is performing static rationalization to reduce alarm rates and then go back to perform dynamic rationalization to address alarm floods.

We recognize this is no small undertaking for any company and would love to partner with you to ensure that you get the best, most cost-effective solution to your alarm management problem. Give us a call, we would love to hear from you.