Still Alarm Management...?

I sat in on a technical session all about Alarm Management this afternoon, and in the British vernacular, I was gobsmacked!! (www.freesearch.co.uk/dictionary/gobsmacked)

Old news, repeated over and over again.  A day of alarm management papers that should have been condensed into a 30-minute problem statement, solution methodology and software tools.  Instead, the vendor presenters bored the audience with stories of an all-too-familiar problem.

But the alarm management problem was already solved over seven years ago with a suite software tools by PAS and has evolved since then.  So what’s up with the ongoing discussion like this thing is new???  Or maybe it is new for the other vendors?

Customers seemed to share my frustrations, indicating that they already know about the problem of alarms.  They said it would be more valuable if someone talked about how to justify these projects so that the existing solutions could be implemented and we could all move on to What’s Next?

Instead, we were subjected to the same ol’, same ol’…. stuff we already knew.  Stuff we already did.

What is up with that??  Have we collectively all made the wrong investments or not paid attention to the obvious??

At least the PAS customers – 4 of the top 6 refiners and 2 of the top 5 chemical companies – have the problem solved.  Now if we could just get done with the others and move the discussion to What’s Next?