At TiPS Incorporated, our goal is to always look for new ways to build a better alarm management system with TiPSView. With this in mind, we always seek to drive for continued optimization and improvment of our products. We are proud to announce several new features as a part of our TiPSView 4.60 release.
Overview of TiPSView 4.60
TiPSView is a browser-based alarm management system, and with this version update, the goal was to optimize its capabilities so the application is both more functional and more customizable for the needs of our users. You can now import and export rationalization data to Excel and get more use out of the Notes feature.
New TiPSView features
The latest update to Version 4.60 is now available to our Extended Support Subscription customers and comes with improvements in two key areas.
Import and export Alarm KB data to Excel
Your rationalization framework establishes when an alarm should activate, why it activated and what the appropriate response is when it does activate. TiPSView users can review and update this information in the master alarm database via the Alarm KB tool.
Alarm KB allows you to make changes to your rationalization data, but there are situations where exporting this data to Excel makes more sense – for instance, when you need to make bulk edits for a new rationalization process or migrate an existing rationalization framework to a new system.
In the past, importing and exporting this data required the use of a Windows application, which wasn’t very user-friendly.
Our goal with the new KB import/export to Excel feature is to make this process easier. You’ll find a functionality on the TiPSView browser interface that allows you to export and import Alarm KB data to Excel in a few clicks. The result is a spreadsheet with a tab for tag attributes and another tab where you’ll find alarm attributes. You can either use the predefined list of common fields when exporting data or customize the fields you want to export.
Improved communication and compliance with Notes enhancements
Notes is a built-in feature available in LogMate netView and ACE that allows operators to create a note to explain their response to an alarm or to share anything other operators should be aware of in relation to an alarm.
We’re rolling out a number of enhancements to this feature:
- Approve and lock notes. Depending on your industry, deleting notes can be a violation of compliance requirements. Administrators can now approve and lock notes to protect them from being accidentally deleted.
- Track changes for a better audit trail. Besides locking notes, you can now see a history of the changes made to your notes. This new functionality leverages the Change Data Capture (CDC) feature available in SQL servers. CDC can track changes made to a database and create a table that gives you an overview of all the modifications made to existing notes.
- Disable unused Note types. Users can choose between three different Note types, including Record, Tag, and Generic. Choosing a Note type helps you stay organized, but it adds an extra step that you can now skip by disabling the Note types you don’t use.
- Create customized drop-down lists. Free-form fields allow operators to communicate, but they can create issues when searching through notes since spelling and wording might not be consistent. We added a customization feature that allows you to create drop-down lists with pre-selected text so that operators can write notes that are more consistent.
We’re always improving TiPSView with new features to enhance alarm management. Do you need help with these new functionalities or want to suggest a new feature? Get in touch with us!