Alarm Management Study Workshop

Having effective operators in a process plant is critical to maximizing production efficiency, maintaining process safety, and plant reliability. 

Operators make numerous decisions that affect Safety. These include actions to avoid unplanned upsets or to mitigate events that could lead to plant outages. A well-designed and highly-functional alarm system can add to the operator’s decision-making ability.

An effective alarm management program can deliverable quantifiable business benefits in the following areas:

• Reduction in unplanned downtime (lost production)
• Increased operator productivity
• Reduction in avoidable maintenance of process equipment.
• Improve Planning with respect to predictive and preventive maintenance.
• Production optimization \ debottlenecking \increased throughput
• Capital savings for SIL requirement reductions (improved safety)
• Reduced environmental \ regulatory incidents.

What Makes an Effective Alarm Management Program?

We at Elite Technical Consulting will work with you to craft a program that is tailored to your requirements, complies with industry standards and guidelines on alarm management (e.g., EEMUA 191, ISA-18.2), improves operational performance, and is sustainable over the long term.

It typically consists of the following steps:

1. Catalogue all current Alarms
2. Development of an Alarm Philosophy Document
3. Alarm Rationalization
4. Advanced Alarm Design (e.g., dynamic alarming)
5. Implementation of Rationalization results and creation of Alarm Response Procedures
6. Alarm System Performance Monitoring & Assessment
7. Auditing Alarm System Practices and Procedures

Our Principal Consultants are experienced and have operational experience to facilitate an Alarm Management Workshop. Finding a balance between Alarms that are critical to Operation and ones that do not add value to operator’s decision making with respect to Plant Upset conditions is key. The ultimate goal is to prevent Alarm flood during abnormal operations.