VANGUARD Alarm Management
Manage alarm data to optimize manufacturing processes

Many situations can affect the manufacturing process, and it’s important to report when problems occur during operations or when events like an alarm take place that need to be reviewed at a later date.

Alarms are a special type of event that are triggered by the PLC when specific parameters go outside of a desired range of operation. Alarms can be both Critical (also known as Hi-Hi, or Lo-Lo) and Warning (a.k.a. Hi or Lo).

When these events occur, a special “alarm” tag is triggered in the PLC, which gets registered in the relational database as either Critical or Warning depending on the way the system was configured. In many applications, Critical alarms require an Electronic Signature as part of the alarm acknowledgement process to capture user information for reporting, while Warning alarms typically do not require that level of reporting.

VANGUARD MDA Alarm Management software manages these events through its application structure and pulls data from multiple manufacturing data sources to provide additional context to better understand each occurrence. The VANGUARD MDA data tools are designed with 21CFR Part11 in mind. Many modern SCADA and DCS systems collect alarm information as well, but typically intermix those events with many other types of manufacturing data.

Additionally, those systems fail to associate important parts of each alarm record with each other. This includes the initial alarm event, the alarm returning to normal condition, and the acknowledgment of the alarm. This leads to the difficult task of creating easy to read alarm and event reports with all three parts of the record connected to each other.

ACCUSign data collection tools within the VANGUARD Alarm Management platform gather information about important events that take place during manufacturing operations, such as process alarms, and link them to one another as well as the currently executing batch on each piece of equipment.

VANGUARD MDA Alarm Management and Data Collection provides a base for a rich set of alarm reporting. By associating alarm records together (in, out, ack.) and to batches, the process of alarm reporting becomes not only possible but actually fairly simple to implement.

Contact Allurént to discover how VANGUARD Alarm Management can optimize your manufacturing processes with advanced data collection and analytics.