Introduction

Most facility management organizations have more alarms than they know what to do with and organizing those alarms can be surprisingly elusive. This article outlines considerations that will help facilities management leaders clarify the plan for how alarms will be organized, so that team members can quickly begin doing productive work that will improve response on critical alarms.

What would a dispatcher need to know?

Some organizations don’t have a dispatcher, but considering this role helps to clarify what information MUST be known about an alarm for an organization to respond. Two alarm characteristics are essential:

• What response urgency is expected for this alarm?
  Who or what shop has initial ownership of resolution of the issue?

When this information is not captured clearly for an alarm, an organization leaves itself open to inconsistent response on critical alarms.

Response Urgency

For urgency, we tend to see the following groupings used to clarify the timeliness of the response business rules:

Initial Ownership of Resolution

Regardless of an organization’s size, some mechanism is needed to clarify the type of problem occurring or skill set required to resolve the alarm. For some alarms, the root cause may be not clear and can vary, so what’s important is to understand who is best to start the initial response. Without knowing where to send the alarm first, a dispatcher may make a poor decision or begin using a response approach that is convenient but not efficient.

Note that understanding initial ownership of resolution does not mean that others cannot be informed, but rather recognizes that the alarm must be sent somewhere to start and it is most important to know where to begin.

Where should I capture urgency and initial ownership of resolution for alarms?

If you are serious about critical alarm response, then where you capture alarm urgency and ownership would ideally be highly visible for end users and available in reporting for management. Virtual Facility provides both of the above and aggregates your alarms into a single solution.

For organizations implementing Virtual Facility, the questions to answer become:

• What can you capture in your BAS?
• How important is it for BAS users to capture the information in your BAS?

Most, but not all, BASes have category and priority attributes on alarms. Generally, customers use alarm category to capture BOTH urgency and initial ownership of resolution for critical alarms, e.g. “hvac_critical”. Occasionally customers align priorities in their BAS to CMMS work order priorities.

If customers have already invested in capturing categories or priorities in their BAS, then we recommend they continue that approach and consider refining it using the guidance in this article. Continuing to capture the information in the BAS reduces confusion with how to respond to an alarm for individuals primarily viewing alarms in the BAS.

For customers not using BAS alarm categories and priorities prior to their Virtual Facility implementation, we recommend using Virtual Facility attributes to categorize their alarms–aligning the use of priority, shop, and category.

Organizing for Response in Virtual Facility

Virtual Facility provides asset-centricity to help organizations increase focus on critical assets and simplify triage. Those attributes can also be useful to guide response urgency and ownership on alarms as well. Explicit clarification through an alarm’s priority and shop can provide a helpful link back to the BAS and ease the transition for most teams. The following table outlines the important alarm attributes you can use to determine alarm response.