Alarm Management and Rationalisation
Getting the alarm system back to something an operator can actually respond to
Alarm floods have contributed to major accidents where the information the operator needed was present and buried. This course covers alarm philosophy, rationalisation, performance measurement against published benchmarks, and the sustained management that stops the system degrading again.
This course sits alongside our Alarm Management consulting work, so what is taught is what we do.
Who should attend
Course content
Every module is taught with worked examples and exercises drawn from real plant, and adapted to your own process where the course runs in house.
Why alarm systems degrade
- The cost asymmetry that makes adding an alarm easy and removing one hard
- Alarm floods during upsets, when the system is needed most
- Incidents where alarm load was a contributing factor
Alarm philosophy
- Defining what qualifies as an alarm rather than an event or a message
- Priority allocation tied to consequence and time to respond
- Classification of highly managed alarms including safety alarms
Rationalisation
- Running a rationalisation workshop efficiently
- Documenting cause, consequence, corrective action and time to respond for each alarm
- Setpoint and deadband review
- Suppression, shelving and state based alarming applied correctly
Performance and sustainment
- Benchmark metrics for average rate, peak rate, standing and fleeting alarms
- Bad actor identification and resolution
- Management of change for alarm additions
- Auditing against the philosophy
What you receive
- An alarm philosophy document template
- A rationalisation worksheet
- A performance metric dashboard specification
- Assessment result and attendance record
What changes afterwards
- Operators receive an alarm load they can act on during an upset
- Alarms credited in LOPA are ones that will actually be noticed
- Bad actors get resolved rather than tolerated
- The improvement holds because change control is in place
Standards and references
We teach Alarm Management and Rationalisation against EEMUA 191 alarm systems, a guide to design, management and procurement and the codes listed with it, at the edition current when you run it.
Run Alarm Management and Rationalisation for your team
We will come back with dates, the pre-reading it needs and a cost per head. Tell us who is attending, what they already do day to day and whether you want it at your site or delivered online.
Ask about dates and cost