Advance Your Alarms with XLReporter’s Alarm Management

According to the ISA 18.2, an alarm is an audible and/or visible means of indicating to the operator an equipment malfunction, process deviation or abnormal condition requiring a response. Unless you have been living in a cave, you come into contact with alarms in your day to day life. You may have seen the “check engine” light come on informing you that there is something wrong with your engine. But what is wrong? This is what separates a well-defined quality alarm from a poorly-defined alarm.

XLReporter’s Advanced Alarms Reporting module provides part of the ISA framework, namely Initial Benchmarking together with on-going Monitoring and Assessment. Users are free of scripting and programming since the module works out-of-box providing powerful information from data generated by alarm software from industry leading vendors.
The purpose of the Alarm Module is to see the wood from the trees, in other words turn raw alarm data (which could be many thousands of data points) into actionable information for change management, ultimately helping to improve the process and reduce costs. That is to say, the module returns metrics on a bevy of common “villains” in an alarm system.

The presence of these “villains” diminishes the usefulness of the alarm system and “robs” the operator of focus. These “villains” fall into categories as follows:
Chattering alarms, stale alarms, frequently occurring bad actor alarms, redundant alarms and alarms that do not require an operator response. Or worse, an alarm overload, an excess of alarms. Causing more important alarms be lost in a sea of useless alarms.

Sounds Complicated. How do I generate this report?

The ISA 18.2 Alarm Management Report works with no configuration on the part of the user. Simply define a Data Connector to your alarms database, and XLReporter does the rest. You can immediately open a viewer window to review ISA-compliant scores. The reports also include ratings for metrics like stale and chattering alarms, alarm floods, and more.

Want to learn more? On July 14th, SyTech is offering a Free Live Workshop on Managing Your Alarm System with ISA 18.2, IEC 62682. Sign up now here!

On the other hand, maybe you need more immediate information. Check out our page on alarm reporting or watch our video on YouTube.