A poor functioning Alarm Management System is often a contributing factor to incidents and major accidents.
Historically, it requires a great deal of time and resources to change this situation due to the in-depth specialist knowledge needed to be able to make safe, qualified and documented changes. In addition, quantifying a business case for this area is notoriously difficult due to the lack of visibility of the operator load and the inability to predict if the operator could increase plant performance after an alarm rationalisation process is complete. Despite these factors, it is commonly agreed that there is a good business case for increasing throughput and decreasing maintenance costs.