Alarm Management Gone Bad

Lyondell went on record today to give the six steps to avoid bad alarm management projects. 

Apparently, they’ve had some bad experiences with various vendors in the past and credit PAS with helping clean up the mess.  That’s nice.

More details are provided on the CONTROL magazine editor’s blog at http://waltboyes.livejournal.com.  But, Walt being the super-prolific blogger that he is will have posted pages more by the time you read this, so you’ll have to page down quite a ways to get to his posting called “More from the Honeywell User Group”.  That entry was posted today, 6/14/2006 at 1:34pm.

To spare you the hassle of trying to find that entry, I repeat Lyondell’s top six steps to avoiding “Alarm Management Gone Bad” as presented by Lee Swindler and cited by Walt in his blog:

1)     Change the culture and provide effective training

2)     Do your alarm rationalization right. We didn't hire an alarm management consultant and we should have. Eventually we brought in PAS to do it right. (Nice comment – thanks Lyondell!)

3)     Exercise caution with new technology. You may hear wonderful things from lots of other people about OPC or other new technologies, but until you've actually used it...beware.

4)     A Site Acceptance Test is critical, and shouldn't be shortened or done without, regardless of the impact on the schedule.

5)     Properly engineered PV settings and alarm bandwidth is important and should not be minimized.

6)     I recommend you maximize hot cutover regardless of what the experts say.

I especially like the reference to bringing in the professionals from PAS to “do it right”.  Thanks, Lee.

For those of you who want the full story, the same Lyondell paper was presented at the PAS User Conference, and can be downloaded from our website – click here to download the paper.  You’ll find Lee’s presentation listed under the “Operations Effectiveness” section of Day One of the conference.

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