Malaysia LNG Alarm Management System (AMS) Process Safety Leadership

Malaysia LNG Sdn. Bhd is operating 9 Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) trains. There are two brands of Digital Control Systems (DCS) been installed in Main Plant Control Center (MPCC), namely Foxboro for Train 1 to Train 8 while Emerson for Train 9. Due to the past projects and plant changes without proper Management of Change (MOC), the configuration of alarms is not according to Engineering Equipment and Material Users Associate (EEMUA) and PETRONAS Technical Standard (PTS). Thus, the effectiveness of alarm as an alert to panel men for action is a concern. 

Journey:

Upon establishment of Process Safety Management (PSM) unit in MLNG, this issue was captured and raised to MLNG management for direction and strategy in year 2010. A special taskforce was formed to tackle top 20 alarms initially as a quick win to reduce nuisance alarms. Along the progression, rationalization roadmap was shaped to cover a total plant alarms with a rough number of 10,000. BUT as a world class organization that is not enough; we aims for more advanced alarm management system with a more comprehensive master plan inclusive of software and hardware enhancement e.g. static/dynamic suppression, systematic key performance index reporting, etc.

Result:

The outcome from rationalization entails thousands of alarm for change implementation, hence a special Minor Process Change (MPC) created to cater this. After a batch-by-batch correction done on DCS, the average plant alarm rate was able to reduce by 50% even though the rationalization is still in ongoing. Nevertheless, a pool of talented facilitators was developed to accelerate AMS progress in-house.

 

Challenges:

Prior the beginning of AMS journey, members’ acceptance on this subject was low. A few sessions of workshop helped to improve their competency and awareness on the benefit of this initiative; Secondly, with great number of alarm for rationalization, tremendous man hours ~60,000 required strong commitment from multidisciplinary parties especially operation department. Apart from that, budget to upgrade software and hardware are huge, planning in staggered manner would be a good strategy.

 

Conclusion:

Alarm management improvement needs persistent effort and it takes time to yield positive result. However, a great planning with staggered execution will expedite nuisance alarm reduction and alarm system robustness improvement. In return, MLNG can ensure safe operation of facilities by having more reliable equipment and better work culture in this organization.