Alarm issues in a production environment are something that every operator knows they have to deal with. Just as death and taxes are an inevitable part of life, process alarms are as much a part of the production business as downtime, maintenance and the occasional bottleneck.

Considering its integral role in production operations across the discrete manufacturing, continuous process and hybrid process industries, and wanting to get to some real insight into how production operators and engineers deal with these ubiquitous alarms, Automation World asked its subscribers to comment on a series of questions related to alarm management best practices. To help ensure an accurate representation of the state-of-the-state in alarm management, the survey was anonymous, with no data collected on respondents other than what industry they worked in and the size of their company.

The nearly down-the-middle split across practically every question on the survey highlights the persistence of alarm management problems across industries.

The baseline
To establish a framework for the survey, the questions focused on the basic best practices of alarm management across seven areas. The areas addressed in the survey included:

• Creation and adoption of an alarm management philosophy for the business;
• Alarm performance benchmarking;
• “Bad actor” alarm resolution;
• Alarm documentation and rationalization;
• Alarm system audit and enforcement;
• Real-time alarm management; and
• Control and maintenance of alarm system performance.

Respondents represented a good cross section of industries, with 52 percent coming from the process industries (primarily petroleum and utilities), 33 percent from discrete manufacturing (machinery and automotive being the two largest industry sectors responding in this group), and 14 percent from hybrid industries, such as food and beverage and pharmaceuticals.

With such broad representation from these industry sectors, an initial review of the results proved surprising: Roughly 50 percent of respondents do not follow any of the basic alarm management best practices.

Yes, you read that right—about 50 percent of end users have no guiding philosophy or practice when it comes to something as ubiquitous as alarm management. Yet, nearly 70 percent of respondents say that alarm overload affects their ability to properly operate the production process.

So, what gives?

Not my job, man
Unfortunately, it seems that many operators and engineers in production operations are disconnected from an overarching alarm management practice because they don’t see it as being part of their day-to-day job responsibility or part of the application they are working on at a given moment, says Rich Chmielewski, Simatic PCS 7 marketing manager for Siemens Industry Group, Alpharetta, Ga.

In his job, Chmielewski visits plants of all types on a regular basis and even conducts alarm management training programs at various facilities. He says the results of the Automation World survey coincide with what he sees in the real world.

“We typically do not see customers defining specifications in terms of deployments or ongoing maintenance of systems following any sort of best practice or standard,” Chmielewski says. “If an alarm is in the system, most operators and engineers figure it must be there for a reason, so they just keep it in. The result is that more and more alarms keep getting put into the system and there’s no comprehensive understanding or ownership of what they’re doing.”

As dire as the alarm management situation is at many production facilities, some progress is being made on a site-by-site approach.

David McCarthy, president and chief executive officer of TriCore Inc., a systems integration firm based in Racine, Wis., says that more systems designers are looking to head off the overabundance of nuisance alarms in facilities they work in by first providing a functional specification as a foundation document detailing the operation of plant floor software.

“Embedded in this document, on a function-by-function basis, is all the critical fault-response behavior of the system software (in addition to all items related to the functional behavior),” says McCarthy. “In this document, all alarms and associated system responses are defined, but in the context of the individual functional operations in which they might occur.”

These specifications are vetted not only with technical staff, but with operations staff as well, McCarthy adds.  This is done to ensure the automated system meets operational requirements and that all safety issues are adequately addressed.

When this is done, “process shutdowns, pauses or stops occur automatically in response to critical alarm conditions, not manually — as is the case with older systems,” says McCarthy. “Safety of people, followed by equipment and product, are all vetted in these specifications.”
Good system designers can no ...