In modern industrial environments, alarms are essential for keeping operations safe and efficient. They alert operators to abnormal process conditions that require attention, enabling timely intervention before small issues become costly incidents. However, when alarm systems become overloaded with unnecessary or poorly configured alarms, they create the opposite effect, overwhelming operators and reducing their ability to respond effectively.

“An alarm should prompt an action, not become part of the background noise,” says Johan Nieuwenhuizen, Sales Director and Co-CEO of Adroit Technologies. He notes that many facilities still struggle with alarm flooding, nuisance alarms and poor alarm rationalisation, reducing safety, productivity and plant performance.

Aligning alarm management with recognised standards

Rather than treating alarms as a maintenance issue, leading organisations are adopting formal alarm management strategies aligned with recognised standards such as ISA-18.2 and IEC 62682 as part of continuous improvement programmes.

An effective alarm management strategy involves measuring alarm performance against recognised best practice, eliminating unnecessary alarms and ensuring operators receive the right information at the right time. Adroit Alarm Management measures system performance against recognised alarming standards and provides actionable insights into alarm performance.

Beyond the control room, Adroit Alarm Management extends directly to field personnel through the Adroit AIR mobile application. Available across major mobile platforms, Adroit AIR delivers secure push notifications for critical alarms, ensuring the right people are informed immediately wherever they are.

“The real value lies in understanding what your alarm system is telling you,” says Nieuwenhuizen. “Once organisations can measure alarm performance objectively, they can begin identifying improvement opportunities that deliver measurable operational benefits.”

Adroit Alarm Management provides performance dashboards and comparison reports that allow organisations to benchmark alarm performance over time. Instead of reacting to individual incidents, teams gain visibility into broader trends indicating equipment issues, process inefficiencies or operator challenges.

Integrated Digital Logbook

The solution also provides detailed reporting capabilities, including identification of recurring ‘bad actor’ alarms, alarm category analysis, acknowledgement performance and exception reporting. An integrated Digital Logbook gives operators and maintenance personnel a structured platform to capture acknowledgement reasons, operational notes, corrective actions and incident observations.

This creates a valuable operational history for root cause analysis, incident investigations and risk management, while integration with maintenance and enterprise systems allows alarm events to trigger work orders and broader asset reliability workflows.

By reducing alarm noise and improving alarm quality, operators can focus on events requiring intervention instead of responding to nuisance alarms. This improves productivity, reduces downtime and supports maintenance planning by highlighting recurring equipment problems before they become major failures.

A mature alarm management programme improves operator effectiveness, equipment reliability, incident response, process stability, safety and compliance. Adroit Alarm Management supports these outcomes through alarm categorisation, KPI tracking, SQL database integration, operator input, bulk configuration, flexible connectivity and association of process values with alarm events.

By combining intelligent alarm notifications, mobile escalation and integrated operational logging, Adroit Alarm Management ensures alarms become actionable workflows rather than isolated events. Operators, supervisors and maintenance teams remain connected from notification through acknowledgement, investigation, corrective action and final resolution, improving accountability, response times and traceability.

Extending intelligence through the cloud

Alarm Management also extends into the Adroit Cloud, providing secure browser-based dashboards and analytics for managers, engineers and executives across multiple sites. The platform consolidates alarm information into enterprise-wide KPIs, benchmarking and trend reporting, while AI-driven analytics identify recurring alarm patterns, nuisance alarms and emerging equipment or process issues before they escalate.

Combined with Adroit AIR and the Digital Logbook, this creates a scalable alarm management ecosystem that transforms alarm data into actionable operational intelligence. “Alarm management should never be viewed as a once-off exercise,” says Nieuwenhuizen. “It is an ongoing continuous improvement process that evolves alongside the plant.”

He concludes: “Every alarm tells a story. With the right strategy and the right tools, alarms become a valuable source of operational intelligence that supports safer, smarter and more productive industrial operations.”