Alarm management as an engineering discipline is rooted in the lifecycle approach to continuous improvement of a controlled process, and involves proactive methods to monitoring and adjusting its performance. Oftentimes process control teams employ software tools to assist in executing assessments and analyses of performance.
LogMate Activity Analyses
TiPS provides a suite of configurable analysis functions based on ANSI/ISA 18.2, Management of Alarm Systems for the Process Industries and IEC 62682, Management of alarm systems for the process industries standards in the LogMate ACE module. Its functionality directly correlates to the Monitoring and Assessment phase of the Alarm Management Lifecycle.
Needing More…
These off-the-shelf features will not satisfy every user’s unique requirements for alarm activity reporting, trending, and KPIs on any given system. TiPS addressed this gap years ago by integrating Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report builder directly into the LogMate environment.
Push Intelligence Data Up and Out
Power BI from Microsoft is a business intelligence platform that enables users to process data from various sources into informative and interactive visualizations. Users are able to create dashboards or other insightful reports that support those data-driven decision-making processes beyond just the automation team.
These visualizations of process data can now be made viewable on a Power BI dashboard directly within the TiPSView client, similar in manner to accessing SSRS reports, but also can be pushed out to the Power BI server on a periodic basis.
In this example, overview data based on a time period’s key alarm counts and metrics representing floods, priority distribution, and chattering categories gets rolled up into a summary table to demonstrate compliance with ISA 18.2. This audit information can be explored further if necessary by using ACE analyses to drill into details.
There are cases when a dashboard of recent alarm and event activity displaying a few key charts is suitable for a well-positioned monitor that conveys the current running performance of a process. With Power BI’s inherent ability to interact with the data, that same dashboard may also be suitable to feed data to department management.
LogMate, SSRS, and Power BI are three powerful tools that when combined provide organizations with a very comprehensive solution for improving their industrial processes through historical analyses and real-time insights. Our goal is to improve efficiency and reduce downtime for the process control industries. Contact TiPS to discuss the current health and performance of your organization’s alarm management initiatives.