From Steve Apple at TiPS Alarm Management

Oct. 14, 2005
Walt- It was great to visit with you. Thanks for the plug in your blog. I did want to state that you expanded on my words a little, and I hope that Invensys doesn't take it the wrong way. In my mind, there is no problem, but I cannot second guess the thoughts of others. One of the reasons we're involved with Invensys is that they do alarm management the right way with their clients. That is to say, they don't do a PROJECT. Instead, they engage their clients in a PROCESS. Their intent is to p...
Walt- It was great to visit with you. Thanks for the plug in your blog. I did want to state that you expanded on my words a little, and I hope that Invensys doesn't take it the wrong way. In my mind, there is no problem, but I cannot second guess the thoughts of others. One of the reasons we're involved with Invensys is that they do alarm management the right way with their clients. That is to say, they don't do a PROJECT. Instead, they engage their clients in a PROCESS. Their intent is to put in an ongoing monitoring process for the alarms using tools to gage the activity, and then analyze potential changes. We like that. Alarm management is something that is relatively straightforward (further away from rocket science than multi-variable control is). However, we find that most of our clients simply don't have the time, and don't do it at this point. So they don't see why they should suddenly take on a new task even if they already have the tools. However, Foxboro seems to have been able to place service agreements with some of these clients. A side benefit of such a service agreement is that the Foxboro guys set up a Foxboro alarm system the way it was designed to be set up- taking full advantage of the internal parameters that it would take years for others to learn.