The APCO SCADA Alarm Analysis module for Ignition provides a comprehensive evaluation of your alarm system's performance, helping you identify and resolve potential issues before they escalate by leveraging the standards established in IEC 62682.
The APCO SCADA Alarm Analysis provides key insights into the health of your alarm system, following IEC 62682 standards. It identifies issues such as alarm priority distribution, bad actors, chattering and fleeting alarms, stale alarms, and alarm floods.
Key features:
With APCO’s expertise and standards-driven approach, you receive actionable insights that enhance your system’s performance and reliability, ensuring efficient alarm management and compliance. Available for purchase for $2,800.
In any SCADA environment, alarms are essential for identifying process deviations, equipment malfunctions, or other operational risks. However, when alarm systems are poorly managed—flooded with unnecessary alerts or outdated alarms—their effectiveness is diminished. Operators may become desensitized, treating genuine emergencies with the same urgency as routine notifications. This situation introduces safety risks and operational inefficiencies.
The story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf is a fitting analogy: repeated false alarms lead to complacency. In SCADA systems, alarm fatigue can result in missed critical warnings, putting both personnel and operations at risk. Without an efficient alarm strategy, managing industrial processes becomes reactive and chaotic.
During an audit of a plant’s alarm system, one of APCO’s controls engineers uncovered a staggering number of recurring alarms—some occurring 50 times daily and others lingering unresolved for weeks. Plant operators had normalized these disruptions, considering them part of their daily workflow. However, the sheer volume of alerts overwhelmed the engineer and indicated a deeper problem: the system lacked a meaningful way to prioritize and address alarms.
This is where APCO’s Alarm Analysis Module for Ignition becomes essential. Designed to help organizations regain control over their alarm environment, the module provides targeted insights and solutions that align with industry best practices.
Each of these issues reduces operational efficiency, increases downtime, and creates a reactive, rather than proactive, operational environment. Addressing these challenges requires a structured, holistic approach.
APCO’s Alarm Analysis Module provides an in-depth, standards-based assessment of your alarm system. Built around the IEC 62682 guidelines, it ensures your alarm management aligns with international best practices. The module empowers users to diagnose alarm health issues, prioritize alerts, and take corrective actions to optimize system performance.
APCO’s approach to alarm management follows a cyclical process of analysis, review, action, and re-assessment:
This continuous improvement process ensures long-term operational reliability and prevents alarm systems from slipping back into disarray.
During one alarm system review, APCO identified 10 alarms responsible for over 75% of notifications—far exceeding IEC standards, which suggest that the top 10 alarms should account for no more than 5% of total alerts. APCO worked with the plant’s engineers to:
The result? Operators reported reduced fatigue, faster response times to genuine emergencies, and improved overall system performance.
A well-maintained alarm system offers significant advantages:
Achieving these benefits requires ongoing analysis and proactive management—a task APCO makes easy with our Alarm Analysis Module.
With APCO’s expertise and our Alarm Analysis Module for Ignition, you can transform your alarm management strategy from reactive to proactive. Say goodbye to alarm overload and hello to efficient, reliable operations.
