Win-911 and the like - Who needs alarm records like this?

[TheWaterboy]

I just installed a distributed Win911 system replacing a cheap small system I built using Ignition and Twilio. that worked great for the last 10-ish years.

Now instead of clean simple well formatted text message notifying operators of events, there is a full blown buggy phone app, with the inevitable trade-off of pretty presentation over useful function.

One feature that the new app offers is ability to ack an alarm from the phone. That just gets a golf clap from me though I'm sure remote users might appreciate it much more.

But what I really find odd though is that there seems to be tremendous hype and focus on the existence of an alarm historical database and the tools to analyze said database. And they apparently dedicate most of their dev budget on improving that part of the software at the expense of the stuff that makes it easy to use. Who actually uses that much analysis on alarm events? HR dept ensuring that an operator is answering his notifications while on call? I just can't see it. Anything I was trying to see forensically would come from the system that is providing Win911 its information so that's where the analysis would take place, not a phone notification app.

I personally think it was a great waste of effort and time to implement this thing and I'm just curious who actually uses all that analysis making it worth the effort to use this behemoth.

 

[cardosocea]

Who actually uses that much analysis on alarm events?

The guys that wrote this:

https://www.eemua.org/Products/Publications/Digital/EEMUA-Publication-191.aspx


I've worked in two companies that did it and know a fair few that also do it. Alarms are incredibly important data, but if they're nuisance they're useless... this standard and said KPI's aim precisely at getting usefulness of alarms.
In my experience it is very good, but as a method somewhat incomplete, particularly for batch industries, as it's perfectly possible that critical infrequent alarms are regularly ignored.

I've found one like that before, alarm was critical but came in twice per week, regular like clockwork for 6 years straight (since the reactor was installed)... because of all other nuisance alarms this was never noticed until a supervisor got curious.

From their fame, I don't trust Win911 to do this though.

 

[TheWaterboy]

Of course alarm triage is important but a simple database fed from the SCADA system is enough to do the forensic work you suggest.
Win911 would do nothing extra in the effort you describe. It might actually make the search more difficult by adding their layer of complexity.

If it was offered in 2 different versions, one for data analysis and one for SMS messaging, that would certainly make more sense. But I'll bet they wouldn't be able to sell the analysis part.

Now that they and Sytech have been merged into whatever VC bought them both, perhaps some sanity can be brought to this. They haven't been the same since v7.