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What is the problem?
Onboarding for Home Owners
Immoscout24, Berlin
Allows industrial organizations to maintain the health of alarm system configurations across the entire enterprise in one place. Alarm champions can leverage tools and guided insights to better ensure adherence to the corporate alarm philosophy.
After merging our platform with IS24, we have doubled the touchpoints to our platform, hence the traffic i
Current System
Design Brief
In an industrial plant setting, there can be more than 2 lakh alarms that need to be managed, assessed, or configured. Without adequate maintenance, alarm system performance will degrade over time, resulting in higher alarm rates, out-of-date alarm response documentation, and an increased risk of incidents. With the health of any alarm system being dependent on each process alarm at each site being configured and maintained as per regulatory guidelines, more organizations are centralizing the alarm management process. Global alarm champions, tasked with driving adherence to corporate alarm philosophies, are presented with the challenge of how to effectively maintain tens of thousands of alarms across multiple sites.
At present, the Documentation and Enforcement (D&E) alarm application is an on-prem 20-year-old product. With
the evolution of connected industrial applications, D&E needs to be uplifted and evolved to be cloud-enabled.
Objective
up to 25% reduction
in Alarm
Rationalization Cycle
Rate of configuration
from 60-80 tags/day
to 110-120 tags/day
up to 15%
improvement in
Operator Response
Times
up to 10% reduction
in Console Alarm
loads
Average results projected based on internal testing
(1) Efficiencies gained compared to using traditional alarm rationalization practices and tools
(2) Improvements compared with systems that don’t meet ISA 18.2 recommendations
Research
Who are our users?
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Alarm Champions
Rationalizes
Alarm
Plant Managers
Approves
Praposal
dsvf.png)
Admin
Releases alarms
back to system
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Operator
Utilizes
rationalized values
Alarm rationalization user journey
​
This process is called the ‘management of change’ or MOC.
Refer alarm
philosophy
Identify
alarms to be
rationalized
Rationalize
and Propose
alarms
Alarms are
approved
Released to
DCS (enforced)
Successful
sync to D&E
Used in
operational suite
by operator
- Nuisance alarms
- Bad actors
- Operator feedback / complaints
- Undocumented alarms
Fetched from
DCS
Problem Identification
Interviews + Workshop with stakeholders and SME’s to identify pain points, groups, and prioritize them for MVO1.
Inefficient system
Use excel to do the actual work, use D&E only to sync it back to DCS.
Time intensive, on-tag-at-a-time system
Bulk changes/approvals/proposals not supported
Lack of visibility
No high-level visibility of alarm related metrics.
Changes difficult to identify
Multiple alarms cannot be viewed together
User Interface
Not intuitive, users have memorized functions.
Needs intensive training for users to understand functionality
Current IA
Repetitive links to same pages
Similar kind of data in different tabs; difficult to use for reference and repetitive
Confusing hierarchy
Solutioning
Key features proposed:
Alarm Configuration Assessment
The core driver for alarm performance excellence is consistent alarm configuration across sites and alignment to the corporate alarm philosophy. Simple, easy to understand, the interactive dashboard on the business network that assists alarm champions to answers key questions such as:
Have all alarms been rationalized, and what is outstanding?
Are alarm priorities correctly distributed?
Do my operators have adequate guidance when alarms occur?
Which operator consoles are deviating from the corporate alarm philosophy?
Are all rationalized alarm parameters being used on the control system?
Rapid Alarm Rationalization
Customized Views to enable Reviewing, Editing, Simplified Searching - A single view for editing multiple and singular alarms/tags.
•Alarm Documentation of multiple Alarms
•Alarm Limits, Dead bands of multiple Alarms
•Priority, Time to Response of multiple Alarms
Support Bulk approval
Streamline Delete and Discard functions- MOC needed only for certain states like approved & released
Near real time Tag Sync. Tags should automatically be loaded into ACM when they are created on DCS
Integrating with M&R Data ( Alarm Frequency, Stale alarms, Bad actors, Alarm response )
Provide filters
Insights and Recommendations
In addition to providing a clear indication of the various health aspects of each alarm system, Alarm Performance Optimizer helps alarm champions pinpoint the areas where they need to focus their attention. By providing insights and recommendations to the alarm champion, they can focus on resolving issues that will result in increased alarm system performance.
Proposed IA
Wireframes and validation
After few iterations and discussions within the UX team, I decided to take it for a quick and dirty testing with the SME’s. There was valuable feedback which helped create the final interactions and especially the dashboard.
a) We have more sub-KPI's which may have insights related to them. We should show them upfront.
b) Scalability for multiple sites
c) Technical reviews helped define the 'insight' section.
Final screens
Alarm Champion dashboard
Overview across entire site
Insights into poor performing KPI's
Key KPI's:
1. Tag rationalization status
2. Priority distribution of alarms
3. Ignored enforcement action
4. Exception status
5. Number of alarms with complete documentation
Configure alarms
Data filters based on parameters including but not limited to: Site, Console, Tag name, Tag Description, etc
Multiple user-friendly options for editing alarm parameters such as inline, multi-row, copy-paste, and drag-drop editing for quick changes, or call up of a detailed display to perform more complex changes.
The ability to select and order columns as required, as well as pin any mandatory columns
Tag detail page
Tag-centric view for users who need an overall perspective of alarm system tag configurations. Using this view, information on all tag and alarm information is available, along with insights for any issues that may impact alarm health, such as missing alarm documentation
Next steps
The next step is scalability - to create an enterprise wide dashboard, incorporating powerful analytics for recommendations over insights, and a birds eye view on all alarm metrics.
​
We started designing the initial workflow for the same, and a vision design of what could be possible using some newly introduced design guidelines. This is incorporated in the roadmap for the Alarm Performance Optimizer. We also need feedback from the Global Alarm Champion to validate + improve our ideas.
Future concepts - workflow
Future concepts - enterprise dashboard