Adroit Technologies has extended the alarm management capability of Adroit ver 7.0.
After introducing the alarm management capability in Adroit the requirement for more comprehensive use of the data became apparent. The Alarm Analysis extension is a logical set of views, graphs, drill-downs and KPIs that allow all levels within an organisation to analyse the data and take an active role in improving the overall plant performance through better alarm management.
Why alarm management as strategy?
Over 90% of installations have some alarming configured that often suffers from similar problems, namely:
* Too many nuisance alarms. Scada installations are mostly configured to create an over-abundance of alarms. According to EEMUA 191 guidelines: an alarm is an event which an operator must acknowledge and then act upon (not simply acknowledge and ignore), and no plant should have more than 6 such alarm occurrences per hour.
* Alarms are simply ignored. Alarms are often ignored because they are inconsequential.
* Alarm viewers underutilised.
* Bulk acknowledgement.
Alarms on alarm viewers tend to be acknowledged blindly.
* Lack of real information. There are software applications making their way into the industrial arena but they tend to focus on the events/alarms themselves without taking into account the dynamics of the process.
The Adroit Alarm Analysis utility provides users with the tools needed to analyse the data produced by the Adroit Alarm Management agent in order to improve the alarm system.
The Alarm Management agent is a product extension available in Adroit ver 7.0 that logs relevant alarm data in a structured database. This data is organised according to industry best practices on alarm management, as specified by the Engineering Equipment & Materials Users Association (EEMUA) 191 document and ISA 18.02 standards.
The Alarm Analysis tools have incorporated these standards along with modifications based experience to deliver KPIs that determine how an alarm system is performing relative to the performance levels as identified by these organisations.
The following screens have been provided to help analyse the data in clear and simple reports and dashboards that assist in the rectification and long term management of alarm system efficiency.
* Alarm system performance: this provides an overview of how well an alarm system performs against the specified performance levels over a period of time.
* Root cause analysis: this displays the incidents that occur most frequently in order to determine which alarms are incorrectly configured.
* Alarm distribution: shows when incidents occur to help identify trends.
* Operator performance: this helps evaluate how well operators are able to react to individual incidents.
* Reasons and notes: this determines the most prevalent reasons and all the notes that are assigned to the incidents that occur during the specified time limits.
* Alarm management configuration: this assesses how well an alarm management system in Adroit is configured, to help identify alarms that are active for more than 24 hours (stale alarms) and other configuration problems.
Conclusion
Whilst not immediately obvious a well-structured and controlled alarm strategy can deliver benefits to an organisation in the form of an increased safety profile, productivity and staff motivation, all of which ultimately deliver higher profits.
For more information contact Dave Wibberley, Adroit Technologies, +27 (0)11 658 8100, davew@adroit.co.za, www.adroit.co.za
| Tel: | +27 11 658 8100 |
| Email: | info@adroit.co.za |
| www: | www.adroitscada.com |
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