Industrial Control Software Limited, part of the Matrikon (TSX: MTK) group of companies has recently announced the release of a new alarm management product called IMAC Xpert for Excel.

IMAC Xpert for Excel is an on demand alarm analysis tool allowing users to generate a range of custom reports to monitor the effectiveness of their site’s process alarm handling capabilities.

Running as a simple Microsoft Excel add-in, the new product uses data collected from an existing IMAC Sentinel alarm monitoring system which is then passed to Xpert for Excel’s database. Using a simple report generation wizard, professionally presented custom documents can quickly be created.

These reports include,

Alarm count by area - Provides a count of all of the process alarms received from each area of the plant over a specified time range.

Alarm count by tag - Produces a report showing the frequency of process alarms that occurred for each tag.

Alarm count over time - Produces a report showing information about the number of process alarms which have occurred within a specified time interval.

Operator actions by tag - Displays the total number of operator actions per tag over a period of time.

Operator actions over time - Produces a report showing a count of the total number of operator actions, such as operator changes.

Operator actions ratio - Shows the ratio of operator actions against the number of process alarms over a configurable time interval.

Standing alarms - Produces a list of all of the process alarms that were active at a specified point in time.

Standing alarms duration - Shows a list of process alarms and the duration they were standing for during a specified time period.

Standing alarms over time - Shows the number of standing alarms during a specified time period and how long they were standing for.

Chattering alarms - Provides a breakdown of all the process alarms which are chattering (raised and cleared repeatedly) within a specified period of time.

Symptomatic alarms - Enables you to view the association between the occurrence of an alarm (Parent) and the alarm that follows (Child). The report displays this information in a list of parent/child relationships that occur within a specified time window starting with each parent alarm ordered in frequency.

ICS believe that IMAC Xpert for Excel is a valuable addition to the Alarm Manager Control Room Edition product suite which also includes IMAC Xpert, a real-time, analysis package based on the EEMUA 191 alarm management guidelines.

The IMAC product suite are out-of-the-box, simple alarm management solutions intended for very small plants, or independent single plants within a large site. With a range of add-on function modules and the ability to upscale to Matrikon’s Alarm Manager Enterprise Edition, IMAC offers the perfect entry level solution for organizations who want to improve alarm handling in the Control Room.

For more information related to this press release, please contact us at,

Industrial Control Software Ltd
Dale Road, Matlock, Derbyshire, DE4 3LU, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 1629 580886 Fax: +44 (0) 1629 582104
Email: sean.herring@ics-ltd.co.uk
Website: http://www.ics-ltd.co.uk

REF: PR25