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TiPS Newsletter - December 2006
Tuning In to a Better Frequency Analysis
We have lots of hallway conversations about alarm management here
at the office. Recently, we were talking about performance benchmarks
based on alarm activity. One of us jokingly suggested that beating
an alarm activity benchmark is easy, just suppress all the alarms.
You'd have a nice, quiet control room and your alarm activity reports
would look fantastic! Of course, the operating team would be permanently
paranoid, but hey - you're meeting your alarm performance goals
- right?
That example's a bit extreme, but does a good job of illustrating
how evaluating a unit's alarm performance using a rudimentary data
analysis can be misleading.
So - If running a basic "top 10" report isn't good enough,
what do you do? Fortunately, there are some simple ways to tune
data analysis to produce results that are more indicative of a unit's
alarm health.
Typically, you want to distill alarm analysis down to those alarms
that truly impact the operating team's workload. From a purely data
standpoint, correlating alarms with operator actions is a good way
to add intelligence to an analysis. It's particularly valuable if
you can filter the analysis to
only include alarms with correlated
operator moves.
In LogMate, this would be done using a modified "Related" analysis.
The traditional use for a Related analysis is to find duplicate
or redundant alarms. With a simple setting change, it will flag
alarms with related actions and return only those alarms.
An alternative would be to manually identify either the alarms that
are or are not important to operations and filtering the analysis
accordingly. This is more time consuming, but can be more accurate.
This is a very valuable look at alarm data because it's identifying
those alarms that really get the operators moving. It not only produces
opportunities to tune alarms - it also highlights parts of the process
that might benefit from better automation - all with an eye on reducing
manual control moves and ultimately reducing variance in the process.
Talk
Back on AlarmManagement.com
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