Late last year, ARC Advisory Group conducted a survey on current practices and trends in alarm management in the process industries. We also wanted to learn how end users, suppliers, consultants and system integrators are approaching the often-challenging issue of migrating existing alarm management applications. Alarm management in general continues to be a big issue in process plants, driven largely by the need to conform to current standards and best practices like ISA 18.2, EEMUA 191, and IEC 62682. The primary goal of these standards and practices is to develop a continuous improvement approach to alarm management and ease the alarm burden on operators so they only see the information they need to see, particularly during process upsets or other abnormal situations.
However, adherence to standards and best practices is not the only issue end users face today. Advanced alarm management solutions have been available on the marketplace for many years now. As a result, many end users now need to migrate to a new alarm management application as their older ones become obsolete. In many cases, users are taking this as opportunity to improve their alarm management philosophy and implement some of the newer aspects of these solutions, such as dynamic alarms that can change in lock step with the dynamically changing state of the plant.
Results
ARC received over 170 responses to the survey. Close to half of the total respondents were end users, while consultants represented over 19% of respondents. Suppliers represented a relatively small portion of total respondents, at just 17,5%. Other respondents included OEM and skid-mounted equipment manufacturers, and system integrators. While not all respondents answered all survey questions, we did note general alignment in the responses, whether from end users, suppliers, or third-parties. We believe that this is significant.
On an industry basis, the bulk of responses came from the oil and gas sector (over 24%), while petrochemicals and bulk chemicals accounted for 19% of responses. Regionally, most respondents were from North America and Western Europe. On a whole, these regions have the largest installed base of advanced alarm management applications.
Most survey respondents had recently implemented a new alarm management and rationalisation project at their company or facility; many on a companywide basis. Clearly, there is still a lot of activity in alarm management and rationalisation and ARC believes this effort will only escalate over the next few years as many end users face the need to migrate from older alarm management platforms, while other users who have not yet implemented advanced alarm management solutions will embark on new projects.
Over 35% of respondents were taking existing applications and applying minor upgrades. The rest were fairly evenly distributed among those who were implementing brand new projects, those who were migrating to a new solution from a new supplier, and those who were migrating to a new solution from the same supplier.
Most respondents (72%) indicated they follow the ISA 18.2 standard. This is consistent with the survey demographics, since this standard is very popular in North America. Clearly, however, many users outside of North America also follow the standard. Close to 20% of respondents indicated that they follow the IEC 62682 standard, which closely follows ISA 18.2.
ARC asked respondents to describe briefly the three primary challenges they faced regarding alarm management project implementation. While we received quite a few different responses, we were able to identify three main challenges in the responses to this open-ended question.
Challenge #1: Getting management buy in and allocating resources
Many of the primary challenges listed deal with human issues, such as getting ‘buy in’ from operators and management, and finding the appropriate amount of time, resources, and training to do the project effectively. Cost and funding issues were also prevalent. Actually performing the alarm rationalisation aspect of the project was also listed as a primary challenge.
Challenge #2: Lack of subject matter experts
Secondary challenges also included human issues such as buy in, ease of use, and basic issues such as time and resources. However, we start to see more specific technical and implementation challenges as secondary issues, such as alarm philosophy development challenges, configuration issues, developing or redefining KPIs, ease of use, and database issues. People issues also start to become more specific, such as finding sufficient subject matter experts (SMEs), developing common work processes and procedures across the enterprise, and resistance to change by operator and other personnel.
Challenge #3: Alarm rationalisation and consistency
We still see some cost and resource concerns repeated as tertiary challenges, but there are also more specific people-oriented and technology issues listed, such as keeping alarm rationalisation up to date, management of change, and implementing dynamic alarming. Achieving consistency in alarm management, while dealing with disparate sources of data, was also highlighted as a key challenge.
ARC welcomes you to share your own thoughts on this important topic. Please feel free to contact the author at lobrien@arcweb.com
For more information contact Paul Miller, ARC Advisory Group, +1 781 471 1141, pmiller@arcweb.com, www.arcweb.com
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