(38b) New Ways to Visualize and Consolidate Alarm Management KPIs

Alarm management. We have been dealing with it for the last two decades, but its concepts, despite of been being essentially simple, are still of difficult interpretation by the operators, plant engineers and especially by the managerial levels. One reason for this is that the main clients of alarm management information (operators, plant engineers and site managers) are, as everyone else nowadays, overwhelmed with too much information and subject to pressures to achieve goals and make quick decisions. Thus, it is imperative to translate the main KPIs usually calculated for alarm management systems in a way that is easy, for someone unfamiliar to automation systems, to understand. These KPIs are, according to EEMUA 191: KPI1 - average number of alarm per time, per operator, KPI2 - maximum number of alarm per time, per operator and KPI3 - percent of time that plant are in a burst situation. Our company has adopted a commercial application to deal with the huge amount of information generated by its alarm systems (about millions of messages per month) and calculate those KPIs. This solution has interesting features like a MS Excel® add-in and a web interface to generate graphics and summarize alarm information for reports. However, the daily acquaintanceship with the matter encouraged us to develop more efficient ways to display the alarm results. The objective of this paper is to present the evolution of our company when reporting and analyzing the alarm management situation of each plant. We are going to present how we evolved from just reporting the KPIs generated automatically by the Alarm Management Software we use to presenting a graphical reports that are of easy and fast interpretation by the plant staff and managers. We have developed a highly automated MS Excel® report that makes use of SQL queries and custom store procedures to generate the information required for analysis quickly, thus increasing the productivity of the engineers in charge of generating the monthly reports. Also, we are going to present how to consolidate alarm management KPIs (defined by operator) in plant KPIs. This came up as a requirement to include alarm management practices in the Company´s Quality Management and Production System. At the same time that it expands the alarm management visibility and importance to the company and all level positions it creates the challenge to meaningfully consolidate the data not only for individual operator consoles, but for different levels and over different time periods. We are going to present the questions we were faced with and the tortuous way we have taken (including the mistakes) to arrive to a reasonably answer.