Streamline Your Document Workflows with Pipeline SCADA Alarm Management for Technical Support

How to create outlook signature

okay so why don't we get started welcome to the webinar on alarm management and I say 18.2 IEC 62 682 on how to get started with an alarm management program just standard messages for exeter webinars you'll be in listen-only mode you can put questions in the questions area and we will review them at the end if we have time answer them live or as a follow up to the presentation the presentation slides will be made available there'll be a link sent out after the presentation along with also a link to the recorded video so my name is Todd Stouffer director of alarm management here at exeter and we are joined by a special guest happy to introduce Peter Capri lien who is the chief technology officer at SCI tech company that makes a piece of software called excel reporter which is something that we're going to look at in this seminar so a little bit about exeter oh sorry I cut off Peter do you want to say something Peter introduce yourself I just wanted to say good morning it could be good afternoon or good evening is what evening yes good day how's that there we go so hopefully you're already familiar with Exeter from having seen some of these webinars before we're a global leader in providing services for functional safety cybersecurity and alarm management we also do personnel certification and product certification for functional safety and cybersecurity and we have a suite of tools for sis design including one for alarm rationalization called soul alarm and we'll talk about that a bit during this seminar and now I'll let Peter describe himself and saitec good morning or afternoon excel reporter has traditionally been a reporting product for industrial applications and through a partnership through Exeter we have now added an ISA 18.2 compliant component which is going to be part of this presentation some of the things that you probably would like to know about excel reporter because what I'm about to say will also apply to the module is that first of all all the design work for templates is entirely custom so you can go into Microsoft Excel use the tools that we provide to design your own template you can put this is where I want my alarms to go but more importantly if you take a look on the right we have all the infant interfaces to all these other products which means that through our traditional connectors you can go and grab live data historical data analytics from those historical data you can also go to relational databases sequel server Oracle and all this information can be auxilary to the reports that we are going to provide they're compliant with your is a 18.2 I did mention excel all the design work is done in Excel but we've created our own standalone engine that will be able to produce reports as workbooks as PDF files or as web pages as a completely standalone product so there's no additional software needed in order to produce or view reports for those of you are interested we use this technology called Microsoft open XML reporting from our product is done automatically in other words you set up a schedule and it will go away and produce and that's going to be important for you as we move forward because you're gonna need to know information about your reporting server boating system in a timely manner and you need to be fed that information constantly and we can also produce reports on demand and that something else we'll touch on later in this presentation excellent thanks Peter we'll see more about that later so continuing the structure of this presentation then we are going to talk about the alarm management lifecycle that's described in the is 18.2 and IEC 62 682 standards will focus in particular on the portions of the lifecycle that talk about performance measurement talk about why you should measure performance what do we judge performance against how do we benchmark an alarm system and we'll also look at some of the common alarm management issues that are the whole reason why we do the benchmarking and performance assessment to view the status of the performance of the alarm system and to figure out how to make it better and then at the end we're going to talk about a new program that we have to actually allow you to get a free assessment report a free benchmark report that would be produced using side tech excel reporter technology so with that let's get started so when it comes to performance measurement and assessment what's relevant and important is both the MUA 191 guideline which was really the first document or practice on alarm management and it contains a lot of best practices it's not a true standard but it's got a lot of good information and it was really the first to provide some recommended metrics and kpi's when it came time to create the is a standardized 18.2 and the IEC standard with the research that had gone into the AMIA documents we for the most part took on board those KPIs that were in a meua or we certainly made sure that we didn't conflict with anything so we kept that consistent and added some new kpi's I believe as well so for performance monitoring assessment mu1 91 is relevant as well as the standard is 18 point 2 which is for the u.s. North America and the IEC 62 682 which is the international version of the standard both ice 18.2 and IEC 62 682 have requirements and recommendations in them for what you need to do from an alarm management point of view now one of the unique things that they both define is what's called an alarm management life cycle which you see here with the different stages such as alarm philosophy where you create a document where a guideline for how to do alarm management at your site we're not going to talk too much about that we have some other webinars that you can check out that talked more about that but you can see there's different stages of the life cycle including rationalization monitoring and assessment audit and what we're going to focus on primarily during this discussion is this monitoring and assessment stage and that has to do with measuring alarm system performance kpi's and identifying problematic alarms or alarm issues we're also going to touch secondarily on auditing and we'll see how audit becomes part of the initial benchmark so a little bit more about covering the alarm management lifecycle and you can see again the standards besides creating this alarm management like cycle we also defined the definition or what an alarm should be and you can see that here and will reference that a little bit later alarm is an audible and they're visible means of indicating to the operator equipment malfunction process deviation or abnormal condition requiring a response so part of our goal in monitoring and assessment is to evaluate whether the alarms our meaning this ideal definition and if they are not then we take them through a process called alarm rationalization where we have a methodology for for truly assessing whether the alarms meet this criteria or not so in terms of support and an alarm management program that addresses all the stages of the lifecycle this is where Exeter and SciTech have partnered Exeter provides products and services that can address from philosophy creation to implementation our SIL alarm rationalization tool can also address management of change and we're going to talk some about auditing and initial auditing that Exeter can help with as well saitec with their excel reporter software completes the picture by providing capabilities to do the monitoring an assessment piece which is part of continuous improvement and also for the initial benchmarking piece so it's the combination of exodus products and services with Scitex excel reporter that allows us to address the whole entire alarm management lifecycle so why is it important to measure alarm system performance well it's actually a requirement of both I say 18.2 and the IEC standard I just want to read what those requirements truly are so you're aware of them first alarm system performance shall be monitored and if you've read any standards before you you know that the word shalt means that this is a requirement so if someone was to come audit you against alarm management best practices or good engineering practices they would expect you to be monitoring alarm system performance they would also that could evaluate to make sure that you are doing monitoring and assessment and essentially the second requirement is that monitoring an assessment of the alarm system performance shall be made against the target performance levels in the philosophy target performance levels means the number of alarms per day per operator alarm flood scenarios stale alarms we'll look at what examples are of these performance levels coming directly from the is a standard and those are typically the ones that end up in an alarm philosophy either as is or may be slightly modified so reason to measure and analyze performance now let's talk a little bit about terminology to make sure it's clear what we're doing and the difference is between an initial benchmarking and an ongoing monitoring and assessment so monitoring is actually the measurement and reporting of your alarm system performance so it's it's purely the the measurement portion of your quantitative elements assessment is the actual evaluation of those measured performance metrics against the KPIs or the target metrics that you've defined so those two obviously go together and audit then is a comprehensive assessment that includes not only the quantitative performance assessment but also an evaluation of the work practices that you use for alarm management such as management of change testing and training things like that then the last term is benchmark that's one of the things we're going to focus on here that's a special term that means the initial audit of the alarm system so if you're going to create a performance improvement program you have to define your from state so that when you make things better you can compare to where you started from so the benchmark is actually the initial audit which would include some quantitative performance measurements and also some assessments of work practices as well so with that let's move on and see how this factors into an alarm management program so the first step really in creating alarm management program for an existing system is to do the initial benchmarking that's the first step we'll look at that's the main focus of this presentation and we'll see that there's quantitative and qualitative elements of that the idea is to identify systemic issues that can then be addressed when you create an alarm philosophy document which will define the guidelines for how you do alarm management that makes you're ready to do alarm rationalization which is the deciding which alarms are truly warranted and need to be there then we create alarm response procedures from the results of rationalisation we may need to do advanced alarming and alarm suppression we implement the results of rationalization and then we also get into a continuous improvement program or mode where we're measuring the performance then we're doing the monitoring and assessment probably on a monthly basis and you'll see that and that really creates a continuous improvement loop where we identify alarms that are not performing well as part of our monthly measurements and then we fix or review them through the rationalization process and then last but not least is a true audit of the work practices that gets done typically on an annual basis or every two years so that's the program that we recommend using it works for any control system and we've applied it successfully with many different customers now for this discussion we're going to focus primarily on that initial benchmark and also the monitoring and assessment to measuring performance because they're similar technology used in those two things so first we'll hit the benchmark so initial performance assessment both quantitative using the tool using a tool such as the SciTech excel reporter tool which we'll see in a second it also includes a qualitative assessment of performance such as you have in a operator questionnaire and then also some auditing of the actual work practices that you use for alarm management and as I mentioned this benchmark establishes your initial performance threshold as well as identifies your systematic design problems that you want to get fixed through your alarm management program and in your alarm philosophy document so just a little bit about the auditing portion here's an example of that operator questionnaire this comes from Emil 191 we've adapted it into an exit of format and can do it electronically that this is a way to gather information on how well the system is working from the operators point of view we can also assess the work practices that are being followed by comparing what's happening against the true requirements of the standards looking at each of those requirements and seeing how they are being implemented or addressed and then last but not least the performance assessment and here we see the recommended KPIs or measurement areas that are highlighted in the ice 18.2 standard and in the IEC standard as well and you can see things like the number of alarms that the operators get how often you're in an alarm flood scenario there's also metrics related to nuisance alarms and we're gonna look at these each of these metrics to understand why they're important next so we'll look at some common alarm management issues and I like to call these alarm management villains and they include when operators get too many alarms whether it's a steady state scenario normal operation or an alarm flood after an upset nuisance alarms are another big area that can impact the alarm system and how well the upper can make use of it there's different types of nuisance alarms such as chattering alarms and stale alarms and we'll look at those a little bit later in Marcin detail and then an awesome another major problem is when the alarm priority is not meaningful in helping the operator to distinguish the relative importance of a given alarm so these villains if you want to call it that if they exist in your alarm system they're really going to rob the operator of an important tool it diminishes the capabilities of the alarm system and if you have these problems to a great degree perhaps almost to the point where the alarm system is not a helpful tool to the operator so that's why we do performance monitoring and assessment to make sure that the alarm system is performing effectively so that it is a useful tool to help the operator deal with abnormal situations and respond appropriately so there's a little background let's take a look at what makes a successful operator response they go through a series of steps to respond to each alarm first step is to detect the alarm they need to see that the alarm is present it needs to be enunciated and they need to notice it obviously if there's a lot of nuisance alarms or there's a lot of flashy colors on your screen the operator might not see or detect that the alarm exists right away might be delayed second step is they need to diagnose what the problem is and kind of figure out what the appropriate corrective action should be and then they need to take their response there so the operator goes through these three steps detect diagnose and respond call that the operator response time so the question then becomes how many alarms how many true arms enorm that the operator actually needs to respond to and I mean other than acknowledging the alarm or silencing the horn how many true alarms can an operator respond to in a ten minute period that's what we'll use as our measurement criteria and the immune and ISA standards with the human performance assessments that have gone on behind it have determined that general operators can't deal with more than one to two alarms every ten minutes on average so that will be one of the key performance indicators that we want to calculate with our excel reporter tool and see what we're actually achieving versus those metrics now if an operator can effectively process one to two alarms per ten minutes continuously how many can they deal with in an upset or an alarm flood and the answer there is on the order of ten alarms in ten minutes and that's what's called an alarm flood which is any time the operator really gets more alarms and they can reasonably deal with this can be one of the most challenging and stressful times for an operator because depending upon how many alarms they get they are very likely not able to effectively understand and respond to each one so they can miss alarms and if they happen to miss the wrong alarm you can end up with an incident or an accident so key parts of our performance analysis is to measure how many alarms we're getting during these upset scenarios and seeing how much of the time were in this kind of an upset now nuisance alarms are another key thing to look at here you can see the definition of a nuisance alarm it's any alarm that enunciates excessively unnecessarily or does not return to normal even if the operator takes the correct response so that's partly what's so dangerous about nuisance alarms an operator can respond and do what they're supposed to do and then perhaps the alarm doesn't clear or doesn't go away in other words their response made no difference whatsoever and obviously if this continues to happen or they're noticing that there's alarms that are occurring and if they don't respond nothing bad happens at some point the operators are going to think that they can ignore alarms and they will just you use that and do that as a way to to prioritize their attention it's very much similar to the boy who cried wolf scenario or fable that's told to young children so nuisance alarms are very dangerous because they truly can make the operators believe that it's okay to ignore alarms so it desensitizes to them to it and it also causes a lot of stress because there's typically a lot of extra alarms occurring making the operating environment very challenging now there's a couple different types of nuisance alarms first one is a chattering alarm this is an alarm that goes into alarm and then clears relatively quickly let's say on the order of three times per minute and you can imagine that if an alarm goes true and then it clears that one second later that that didn't have anything to do with what the operator did because they probably didn't even get a chance to acknowledge the alarm in that time so that can be very frustrating it can be very difficult for them to concentrate to focus on what's going on so that's one of the reasons why we want to eliminate chattering alarms as much as we can and you can see the standards pushed to say yeah you should not have any chattering alarms or if you do you should be making plans to correct them or to fix them fleeting alarms or another type of nuisance alarm very similar to a chattering alarm it's just the only differences they don't immediately repeat bad actors and I apologize to any Arnold Schwarzenegger fans out there that actors are a category of alarms where your top 10 or 20 alarms typically you may find if you've not done an alarm rationalization that they contribute maybe 50 to 80 percent of all the alarm traffic which means there is a handful of alarms that are causing most of the problems so that's why it's very useful to identify those and to see what portion of the total alarm load they make up because they become prime candidates to be fit to be fixed during the rationalization process the other type of nuisance alarm is a stale alarm this is an alarm that's active for more than 24 hours these can be very challenging to fix because they could be hardware problems they could be alarms that have the wrong set point for the mode of the process but they are detrimental to performance because they fill up the alarm summary display and make it much harder for operators to see new alarms and in some cases I've been in control rooms where the whole entire alarm summary is full of stale or standing alarms enough that you need to scroll through a couple of pages before you get to the the latest alarms the last category for evaluation is the alarm priority and we'll look at the annunciated alarm priority this is the distribution of alarm priority that the operator actually sees and it's recommended that you would have just three or four different alarm priorities to make it easily understandable for the operator but the idea is you should only have a small fraction of all your alarms to be at your highest priority what's recommended is if you have a three priority system that would be about five percent would be high fifteen percent would be medium and eighty percent would be low the idea being priority is really supposed to guide the operator to know when they have multiple alarms which one is the more important one which one did they respond to first so priority is really important and if you don't have the priority set correctly or some methodology that really reflects how important the alarm truly is that's going to give the operator bad advice and of course if 50% or more of all your alarms are high priority then the operator can't really tell which alarms are most important and thus none of them are high price Ardi so that's why we drive to look at those performance metrics so those are the key things that we're gonna look at in our benchmark and our ongoing monitoring and assessment and why they're important so now let's take a look at what some of those reports look like and the type of information that can be contained so one of the areas of this benchmark performance report that can be created from the SciTech excel reporter technology is a overall benchmark that shows your current performance your measured actual alarm system performance and compares it directly versus what the recommendations are and the is a standard now you could change the target to be what is specific to your alarm philosophy if you like but as a initial starting point if you don't know where you are or have a gut feel but not a quantitative feel to back it up this benchmark group work into a great job there so you can see it can do the actual calculations and tell you where you compare so for example the number of chattering and fleeting alarms we said we want that to ideally be zero and in this case in this example there's 132 of them so the idea is this benchmark report can really show you where you stand and give you quantitative proof of the performance and perhaps the need to create an alarm management improvement program so now Peters gonna talk a little bit more about what goes into that benchmark report and the information contained thanks Todd I've been in a few systems where you know alarms every month and go into the hundreds of thousands and you look at a situation like that and you say well where do I start and I think the benchmark report answers that question and what we've done is we've created a way in which you can go out and collect a sample of your reports and send it to us now we've provided all the instructions on how to do that on our website but it essentially means you running a small program on your system to create a encrypted file that contains any range of alarms from 15 to 30 days from there what we will do is we'll send you a twenty page plus report at no cost and you may wonder well why is Saito doing that well first of all you need a benchmark you you need to know whether it's whether you need a justify investment in exploring improvements inside your alarm system it also provides a basis for discussion you know if you have nothing it's hard to discuss it's difficult to get good input from an operator because they'll only give you day-to-day responses where is this bench of our report is gonna give you some long-term view of what's been going on it's also gonna help justify any investment that you plan to make the report itself is like it's a twenty plus pages it gives you information about all the ISA KPIs and how you stand against them and that was shown on the previous slide then when we need to move forward excel reporter can be used in two different ways that can be used off premise or on-premise and off-premise you can subscribe to monthly monitoring and assessment reports which we'll see later or on-premise excel reporter can be installed at your facility and will be running in a periodic manner and the advantage of off-premises it's very low risk it doesn't require any change to your system except you having to run that encryption a collection program on a timely basis and will send you the reports a lot of customers like that because they say you know why do I need to go in invest in hardware software IT and all the other all the other costs that are usually incurred in getting an on-premise and I'm gonna make that expense and only use it once a month I don't know if I can justify that however I'm premise customers will say I want it on-premise because I like the fact that you can go out and capture data from my historians my database is my life data and also that I can go in there and customize my reports ing to my tastes also on-premise will allow you to start distributing information automatically as well so both have a place and and we've we've we've packaged it such that you can pick and choose which which one suits you best okay thank you Peter so that's the benchmark the initial performance measurement baseline we also mentioned that it would include some operator questionnaire and some auditing of work practices now let's switch gears and look at the true monitoring and assessment stage of the lifecycle and other information that we might be got gathering here so Peter you want to talk more about what Excel reporter can do here yeah so now that we've gone past the assessment todd has gone in with his organization provided services or you've gone in and you've rationalized your system by yourself the next thing that we need to start thinking about is how do I get continuous feedback of what's going on how can I monitor my improvements how can I see some long-term trends of what happened over the last six months to see that we heading in the right direction that's where next our reporter is either going to be off premise or on preface but whichever way you go there are out-of-box templates in both cases and if you it you can display you can design your own as you can see over the right this is a template that was designed by your customer they decided in Microsoft Excel they felt very comfortable doing this in Microsoft Excel and then they used excel reporters tools to overlay the data that they wanted showing on this particular report the other key factor here is is on-premise you'll be able to combine it with your process data there's nothing better than being able to see maybe some analytics like the men max an average of some key process values over the duration of the alarm period you know we have customers that are concerned about their alarms but they're also concerned about well how did that affect my process because if it had an adverse effect on my process then what we are producing has got to be deemed unusable and so process data combined with alarm data is a very very powerful statement to make and then there's the automatic distribution again is an on-premise feature but the automatic distribution means that you'll get more eyes on the data people will be able to receive information in a timely manner via email or by webpages on my next slide shows that it shows actually this shows one of the this is shows one of the reports that you will receive in either on or off premise it's a multi tab report the first tab is actually a reflection on the ISA on the is a target and also the results with years color coding here to highlight what the state of players but as from a distribution point of view this is also published as a webpage which can be viewed on a mobile device the key thing here is that if you didn't like the look and feel of this you can easily modify it yourself and change it to your own sort of corporate corporate look it's a multi tab report as you can see here and you can pick and choose which tabs you want you can remove you can create one of these on a monthly basis and decide to save these metrics to a database so that if you are looking for long-term trending you have all this information stored away for you to you know make an assessment of how the improvements are going so let's look at some of those other tabs and some of the other detailed information that appears so looking at the top alarm sources bad actors we call it is one of the the most important things for ongoing alarm management provement and you can see here it's shown kind of in a Pareto chart format here we look at the actual statistics and identification of the worst-performing alarms we say why is this important or we may have 10,000 20,000 alarms configured in our system but there's going to be a handful that likely drive the majority of the activity and in this case we're finding that there is a single high alarm for a pressure regulator that is creating almost 8% of all the alarms so just that one alarm out of 10,000 or whatever is creating 8% of the notification so obviously something probably wrong with that alarm or the design or maybe it shouldn't even be an alarm in the first place so the identification of what you see here becomes a great list of the alarms to look at next or immediately when it comes time for rationalization it also shows the actual timeline of the number of alarms per day and per hour when within a specific day and this is important because you get one picture of what's happening by looking at averages but you get a different view of what's going on by looking at the daily actual measurements so we could have a scenario where the average number of alarms is acceptable over the reporting period but it's not until you look deeper into the daily that you see that there's maybe many days that are quite acceptable with low alarm activity but then there's also days with high alarm activity they may actually exceed the recommended value so that would say that even though our average alarm rate is good if we look at it on a daily basis there's still areas for improvement one of the things that we can home-in if we if we do that and look at the daily activity and hourly activity then we get into looking at an identifying alarm floods which again are the scenarios where the operator is getting more alarms and they can realistically deal with 10 alarms per 10 minutes and here you can see some excerpts from sight from excel reporter that show that the time line of the alarm floods when they happen how they compare to each other how long they last for and then the statistics that go with it so we can see there were quite a few alarm floods that occurred here and some of them lasted quite long 170 minutes 300 minutes and some of them had quite a few alarms during that time period 300 alarms and in the alarm flood so this is all very good information and then we can look further into what alarms are actually included in that alarm flood and then that can be something that's addressed or fixed during rationalization we also talked about the the average alarm rate and here's some more statistics into that to see by day again what are the number of alarms that we're getting and also included by priority and then you can look at those metrics on a daily basis as well and then one of the things that Peter mentioned is you can actually historize the KPIs as well so if you have the average number of alarms for the month of May and then the month of June and July in August you can now historize those and see how they trend over time again to show whether you're making things better or keeping things where they are or performance is slipping another key thing to look at again is this is the stale alarm the alarms that are active for more than 24 hours those represent problem scenarios those are alarms if the operator is going to ignore because either his response doesn't make the alarm go away and there's no consequence occurring or perhaps the alarm set point or limit is incorrect for the current mode so those are alarms that definitely we want to fix or get addressed so we've got the the detailed list of those particular alarms those stale alarms and how long they've been in alarm this list may also reflect alarms that are not working correctly maybe there's a problem with hardware so you could use this list to identify instruments that need to be fixed by maintenance so that's a and also a good use of this information chattering alarms are the nuisance alarms that go in and out of alarm with a high frequency or don't state an alarm for a long period of time and here you can see identification of particular alarms that fall into that category the number of times that they activate the average time that they're active so for example all of these on this chart are active for an average of one second so obviously that's not a very useful alarm there's not even enough time for the operator to acknowledge that alarm let alone take a response to correct whatever potential problem underlies that and then there's beyond the standard charts that we see there's some additional enhancements and customization that can be done Peter do you want to jump back in and and continue here yeah what's probably notable here is is that we we sometimes are asked is it possible to take this information and move it to a different system it might be the business system or it might be might be a server where the engineers actually work and the answer is yes as I alluded to earlier any of these KPIs can be exported to a database in situations where the IT department doesn't like us writing Torelli to a database we can produce the information as an XML or CSV and that then can be used by the IT department to import it into their si P system or it may be the quality control engineer nice had information for their purposes we've already talked about combining it with other factors like the process KPIs what one thing that's probably notable as well here is is that when we produce this the information about the alarm system we don't replicate the alarm system in our own database the actual number crunching is done live and that's important to us as well customers didn't like the fact that oh so you're gonna take our data out of our alarm system and put it in your alarm system and there were there was a little bit of resistance by a few customers in that scenario so we decided we'd go alive all the time so if you punch in a couple of dates we're actually doing the number crunching at that moment in time and finally getting this information out that there are more people seeing it on a daily basis we can't just leave all these KPIs in the control room they have to be emailed out to people they need to be published to web pages so that people can use their browsers on the company network to see the information and so more eyes on the process is as important as the KPIs themselves okay thank you Peter so then after we have all this data we need to do something with it so we're not we're not gonna leave this webinar until we talk about some of the things that you should do the actions that you should take when you've identified alarm management issues so hopefully part of what you're seeing is that having a tool to do alarm system performance measurement and a tool to do alarm rationalization really set you up for effective continuous improvement and it's the performance measurement tool that is identifying the current batch of poorly performing alarms that would potentially be the ones that would be fixed in your next rationalization session so you can see with Excel reporter identifying the pro-league performing alarms and Exodus Oh alarm tool we can create an effective continuous improvement process now just a little bit about alarm rationalization which is probably going to be the the main method for fixing the alarm issues that you identify the rationalization process consists of a series of steps the first is to check whether the alarm is valid or not based on the definition of an alarm because we might find that that alarm that's occurring 5,000 times in a month doesn't really even need to be an alarm because it doesn't have a purpose so rationalization process could prove that it's not needed and it could be addressed by eliminating the alarm altogether additionally we look at what's the consequence if the operator does respond what are the likely causes of the alarm what are the corrective actions that the operator should take when the alarm occurs we estimate the amount of time that's available for the operator to respond those are the first things that we do during rationalization because that helps us identify alarms that don't belong and then we continue with assigning the alarm priority based on whatever methodology is defined in the philosophy assigning the alarm class or classification reviewing or adjusting the alarm set point again that can address performance issues like stale alarms for example if the alarm setpoint is incorrect modifying attributes like on delay off delay hysteresis deadband that's a key step in addressing for sure chattering alarms so one of the first things to do with the chattering alarm is to look at whether dead band or on/off delay can be applied to eliminate those short time periods and then the last step in the rationalization process is to determine whether there's any states of the process or modes of the equipment where the alarms should be suppressed or have a different alarm limit and you can imagine that would be one way that could address some batch of stale alarms is by implementing some advanced alarming techniques so that's the rationalization process we can go through that whole thing in the so alarm tool it guides you through that process and documents the results then you implement that back in your control system and then hopefully you'll see performance improvement and then the next month when you do your monitoring and assessment reports hopefully you'll see the benefits of what you've done so we're getting to the end of our webinar here today but now the last thing that we wanted to talk about was if you don't have an alarm management program yet and you're struggling with the how do I get started where do I get started well we we can help Peter mentioned earlier that there's an opportunity to get a free bench mark assessment report what we looked at earlier you can see the link on the éxito website to to go into request or to look at the information that's there what it entails is providing some information about your application if it's the right kind of system that we're looking to work with then we'll send you a link to download what's called an alarm collector that would be put onto your system to gather the alarm data and then that gets sent to the SciTech website which will take that data and then create that report and then send that back to you Peter is there anything you want to add to the the process for how that works only that if you are going to use the file transfer utility you will need to contact us for a passcode or you'll need to send tell Danny mail for a passcode right excellent okay so certainly think about leveraging that capability if you're trying to jumpstart your alarm management program or you want to get management support for what needs to be done as we showed this will clearly identify your current performance versus the targets that are in the I say and IEC standards so for more information on SciTech and excel reporter some information there and then on that note we'll say thank you and see whether we have any questions questions can also be entered in the chat window if you wish yes as well so there's questions window in a chat window so here's one question for you Peter how fast would you get their report back once the data is submitted we've we can crunch through and I say crunch because you may have realized there's a lot of marrying that has to be done between when alarm occurs when it was acknowledged when it was activated we get through half a million alarms and about I would say about 10 seconds well ok so it's reasonable to expect perhaps overnight turnaround or a day turnaround for the report that are the respond the response of the ìiî I thought the question was about the responsiveness of the program of the engine itself yeah in terms of getting the benchmark report I would say within 24 hours that would be reasonable okay excellent it's a good question anything any other questions here in a live system how long would it take a user to get a report from Excel reporter so I guess that's a question about on-premise SAS as I said we've had customers that have of the order of half a million alarms in 30 days and that was being pulled out in you know 10 15 seconds okay awesome so with our scheduler running in the background you you would typically run it as a service and it then could run every day if you wish or every week or every month it's entirely up to you so then there's a question is alarm rationalization lorem masking or other activities part of this package it's a great question they're not part of the excel reporter tool but excel reporter tool is an excellent input to those activities and those activities would go on separately they're a different stage of the lifecycle alarm rationalization can be done with the cell alarm tool that can also define some advanced alarming alarm flood suppression state-based suppression requirements as well and I think that is it for the questions and just one follow-up as I mentioned earlier the questions that we see here we will create an email that's got the questions documented and the answers as well both from this session and we're conducting it again in the afternoon so a combination of the questions and the answers in written format as a follow-up item so on that note I'll say thank you very much for attending and thank you Peter for for joining us as our guest presenter and we hope you continue to tune in and enjoy exit of webinars and have a good to the day thank you