Effective alarm management is a pre-requisite for process plants that want to be successful in today’s global marketplace. It impacts the bottom line by minimizing unplanned downtime, reducing insurance premiums, preventing process safety incidents, and enabling operational excellence.  To deliver these benefits to the bottom line requires personnel who have been trained on industry best practices and how to apply the ISA-18.2 / IEC 62682 alarm management standards. This course is designed to help personnel develop the skills and knowledge to drive effective alarm management practices within an organization.

The course is structured around the the alarm management lifecycle; reviewing the key requirements / activities of each stage along with industry best practices.  It focuses in-depth on the engineering, design, implementation, and operational and improvement tasks that would be led by the practitioner; rationalization, basic alarm design, HMI design, dynamic alarming, designed alarm suppression, alarm shelving, implementation of alarm response procedures, evaluation of alarm system performance, and use of alarms as process safety safeguards and layers of protection. Human factors principles are introduced to show how they impact effective operator performance. Exercises are designed to demonstrate key principles applied in real situations. “Lessons learned” are shared from numerous successful alarm management projects around the world and from being an “insider” during the development of the standards. 

Examples are shown from different control systems including: Emerson DeltaV, Siemens PCS 7, Rockwell PlantPAx, Honeywell Experion, ABB System 800xA, and Yokogawa Centum / CAMS.

• How to create and structure an effective alarm philosophy document
• Establishing objective criteria for determining what is a valid alarm vs. an alert, prompt, or message.
• How to rationalize alarms to ensure every alarm is meaningful to the operator and results are documented in a Master Alarm Database (cause, consequence, corrective action, time to respond) 
• Effective alarm prioritization based on potential consequences of inaction and allowable time to respond 
• Establishing alarm setpoints based on design constraints, operating boundaries, process dynamics, and safe operating limits
• Effective use of alarm classification for administration, reporting, testing, performance evaluation, and MOC
• Similarities and differences between alarm rationalization and process hazard analysis (PHA); when to leverage PHA results during rationalization
• How to treat system / instrument diagnostic alarms and alerts
• Effective design and implementation of safety (related) alarms
• How to apply alarm deadband and on / off delays to prevent nuisance alarms
• Applying human factors to improve the operator’s response through improved HMI design and use of alarm response procedures
• Best practices for implementing conditional alarming, state-based alarming, and alarm flood suppression
• Keys to effectively implement / allow operators to manually suppress alarms (alarm shelving)
• How to evaluate alarm system performance vs KPIs 
• How to identify and resolve common alarm management issues (e.g., nuisance alarms and alarm floods)
• Implementing an effective and useful management of change process
• Alarm system maintenance

• Process engineers
• Operators and their supervisors
• Control system engineers
• Safety, risk management, and environmental personnel
• Maintenance technicians & engineers

The Alarm Management Practitioner (AMP) Program is designed to teach end users, integrators, suppliers, and regulators how to realistically apply the most important concepts from the ISA-18.2 and IEC 62682 alarm management standards. The program was developed by exida experts who were instrumental in writing the ISA-18.2 standard and associated technical reports. It leverages exida’s experience from hundreds of alarm management projects to deliver the most important principles and the keys for success.

The AMP program will be offered in conjunction with the exida Academy Training course ALM 102 – Fundamentals of Alarm Management for the Practitioner: How to Apply ISA-18.2 / IEC 62682, which is offered generically or for specific control systems. 

The exam will be given at the conclusion of the training course, and is optional. Therefore if you wish not to participate, please let your instructor know. The candidate must achieve a minimum of 80% on the exam in order to receive their AMP certificate.