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C5. Best practices for proper alarm management

Proper alarm management is essential for safe facility operations, as it helps operators address critical issues before they escalate into incidents. Effective strategies include regular reviews of alarm statuses, monitoring of inhibited alarms, and leadership accountability to ensure compliance and safety. The integration of advanced technologies, such as AI, is expected to enhance alarm management practices in the future.

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11 views

C5. Best practices for proper alarm management

Proper alarm management is essential for safe facility operations, as it helps operators address critical issues before they escalate into incidents. Effective strategies include regular reviews of alarm statuses, monitoring of inhibited alarms, and leadership accountability to ensure compliance and safety. The integration of advanced technologies, such as AI, is expected to enhance alarm management practices in the future.

Uploaded by

Chemical.Ali
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Best practices for proper alarm

management
8/7/2024
Process alarms are critical safeguards put into place on operating units to enable
operators to avoid incidents that impact a company’s safety, reliability and bottom line. It
is absolutely essential to any safe facility operation that alarms are properly managed
and utilized to address real and consequential operational issues before they become
incidents.

How can alarm management performance be evaluated? For example, some top
performing line operations managers request a snapshot of the alarm screen each
morning with an explanation of the cause of any active alarms and what has been done
to address the issues. Unfortunately, this can result in unintended consequences, as
operators will take purposeful actions to reduce or eliminate alarms by deactivating
them, thus giving managers a very small non-representative list of active alarms each
day—with some having zero active alarms—which does not reflect the actual state of
operations.

Some of these top performers are mistakenly seeing their desired “performance”
achieved because their console operators put problem alarms into a “shelved,”
“bypassed,” “inhibited” or other “named state” that removes them from an easily
monitored condition and effectively removes them as safeguards for serious incidents.
Some console operators do this to make it easier for them to operate without
distractions. Most do not understand that the safety of their operations is at risk when
they disable critical alarms, regardless of their reasoning. To combat this issue, most
consoles have timers to prevent the alarm “bypass” from remaining active beyond the
current shift but that allow it to be extended easily by the oncoming console operator by
“selecting all” and authorizing the extension. This is an unacceptable process.

Case study. The company senior vice president (SVP) of operations had cause to visit
a floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility. The offshore installation
manager (OIM) had prepared an agenda, but it was approaching 6 pm and the OIM had
planned a dinner with the leadership team. However, after disembarking the helicopter
and being taken through the health, safety and environmental (HSE) briefing, the SVP
immediately donned his personal protection equipment (PPE) and requested a visit to
the control room. There were some puzzled looks on the faces of the crew, but the SVP
was clearly setting an example of good, strong leadership. Entering the control room,
his first request was to see the inhibits and overrides register, where he randomly
selected a few items and posed several questions as to why these inhibits had been in
place for so long. This was a great demonstration of a senior executive who was well-
versed in operations and, more importantly, operational risk.
Proper alarm management. Good leaders “walk the talk,” where they make clear their
expectations to all stakeholders—especially front-line supervisors—and make very clear
the consequences in the event of non-compliance when managing risk.

Monitoring and action by leadership and support organizations to address the root
causes of excessive and nuisance alarms are required to ensure safe and incident-free
operation. It is critical to have the alarms that are “inhibited” or “shelved” capture daily
via metrics to allow management to understand the current liabilities and to reinforce the
actions that impact alarm management (FIG. 1). Many companies have added a
distributed control system (DCS) report each morning that addresses each point that
has had its alarm status manually changed, called a point attribute report (PAR). This
report, combined with the alarm screen shot report or similar indicator, is a better
measure of proper alarm management.

FIG. 1. How would you handle it? Source: Roman Tingle.

Proper alarm management that enables operators to avoid serious incidents includes an
alarm management strategy comprising the following:

 A DCS engineer key that is properly controlled to inhibit critical alarms


 The installation of timers on non-critical equipment, but high-impact alarms that
limit the time these alarms are inhibited
 A console operator and line management review of a performance and
accountability report (PAR) by each shift, and a second-level review of alarm
screen shots and PAR reports on a daily basis
 A process in place to review frequently inhibited alarms to remove or change
alarm points or otherwise address the root cause(s)
 Hazard and operability analyses (HAZOPs) and alarm objective analyses on a
regular and set frequency to reduce alarm redundancy leading to alarm overload,
but also triggered by any incident investigation
 All new alarms undergo a rigorous alarm objective analysis (before final HAZOP)
to ensure no over-alarming of new equipment.

As part of an alarm management strategy, a recent review of a month’s alarm activities


for a typical facility—where reported performance was good, with no issues around
alarm avalanche or alarm overload for the console operators—is shown in TABLE 1.
Since these are averages for the day for 144 10-min periods, potential alarm overload
issues may be hidden—they may have occurred during a short period but are diluted by
other periods of no alarms during the day. Reporting the number of 10-min periods with
alarm overload conditions and providing the ability to examine the details of each may
provide a more insightful report. Further, a detailed review into inhibited alarms should
be undertaken to understand if these data are a realistic picture of the console alarms.

Console 1 shows good performance until the last two days of the month: a major upset
occurs on Day 30, with alarm rates well beyond what could be managed. A detailed
review of the upset is warranted, with modifications needed and made to make the
response manageable for future events.

Consoles 2 and 3 indicated the best performance of the group and would be considered
good performance, assuming that these are realistic reflections of actual alarms without
inhibition.

Console 4 showed issues mid-month for 8 d. Understanding what caused the elevated
alarm conditions is warranted with corrections made to prevent recurrence.

Consoles 5 and 6 required major alarm management reviews to correct their ongoing
alarm overload performance. A steady diet of alarms every few minutes is not a
reasonable workload for console operators and will prevent the safe and reliable unit
performance that comes with steady-state operation. There is low probability that the
advanced controllers are properly enabled with adequate freedom to keep the unit in
stable and optimal operation.
Today’s operations require a much more sophisticated evaluation of current alarm
conditions with the limited view available for those other than the control operator. Some
companies include a screen dedicated to critical alarms as part of their DCS screen
distribution, which allows ready access for the console operator, as well as technical
support and line management.

Excellence in alarm management is truly a team effort. It requires competent console


operators, a robust maintenance program, knowledgeable process control engineers,
and leaders who require excellence in alarm management. It also requires appropriate
metrics that monitor performance, combined with the appropriate reinforcement of the
metrics that does not encourage inhibiting repeated alarms, but rather the investigation
and resolution of the root causes of those frequent alarms. Process units with their
advanced control system activated have the highest likelihood of excellent alarm
management performance and safe, reliable and profitable operation of the unit.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is beginning to be applied to alarm management in different


industries and will play an increasing role going forward—the basic fundamentals
described in this article will still be applicable.

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