Simple Approaches to Alarm Management Can Improve Life Sciences Research Continuity

Simple Approaches to Alarm Management Can Improve Life Sciences Research Continuity

In life sciences, building managers have big responsibilities. Uptime, research continuity, sample preservation, and regulatory compliance often fall on the shoulders of building managers. Why? Because building managers are the ones that keep labs, cold storage, and first run manufacturing operating. That includes expectations to quickly detect, diagnose and respond to potential issues and system failures that could result in costly disruption, downtime, loss, regulatory, and safety risks.

In meeting these expectations, many building managers find themselves inundated with alarms and alerts from their building management systems (BMS). These alerts can buzz daily if not hourly without having a “special Bat phone” to indicate which ones are absolutely critical to address now – or else.

When multiple alarms are triggered multiple times a day, it’s difficult to differentiate between a critical failure that needs immediate attention and a minor issue that can safely wait. Just ask any building team member who has received a 2 a.m. wake-up call on Christmas Day for what turned out to be a small, non-urgent issue in a non-core part of the research facility.

Alarm saturation can eventually lead to alarm fatigue. In a recent industry survey conducted with CIM facility managers, respondents said they receive an average of 12.5 alarms a day, with more than 50% of them receiving up to 30 alarms daily. Significantly, 76% of the survey’s respondents wanted to see improvements in alarm system management approaches.

Vetting, filtering, and purging hundreds of email alerts consume the team’s valuable time and precious human resources. Understandably, life sciences building managers begin to ignore the alerts, assuming they are false alarms or aren’t urgent. In the CIM survey, while two-thirds of facility managers said they received alerts from their BMS, only one-third reacted to them. This inaction in essence renders the alarms useless, which in turn leaves buildings vulnerable to truly critical and costly failures that go unaddressed.

The Answer is Simple: Prioritize Critical Alarms

The fact is critical building systems fail. Temperature, humidity, pressure, air quality and filtration, and refrigeration are the heartbeat of the lab for storing biological samples, running experiments, and maintaining clean room standards. When these systems fail, the quicker the response, the better the outcome. And guess what?

The answer is simple: prioritize critical alarms as part of a building and research resiliency plan. That plan should include technology that plugs into your BMS and allows for critical alarms to be prioritized and a clear escalation path to be established for corrective action. Here are questions to ask when evaluating whether BMS critical alarm technology is right for you:

1. What’s cost and reputational impact of top 10 alarms going unanswered? Do your top building systems include a chiller plant cooling a sizable lab? When these go down, could specimens be irreparably damaged? Could there be trouble with regulatory bodies because data becomes unavailable. As building and facility managers, we can’t afford to take these kinds of risks.
2. How will your team embrace critical alarm technology? Building and facility management and engineering teams continue to shrink. Regardless of size, the most effective teams embrace simple technology and services that make their jobs easier. While it can feel like building engineers need to be data scientists, alarm management is a low risk, low cost, high impact starting point to get teams comfortable with predictive technology.
3. How big is your building portfolio? You need the flexibility to manage a single lab or portfolio, and the diversity of clean rooms, cold storage, and first run manufacturing. Your critical alarm technology must be straightforward enough to manage the needs of a single building yet scalable for a multi-regional, multi-use campus.
4. Where does BMS data need to be managed? For critical alarm technology to work, BMS data must live on a cybersecure private cloud network. It’s not possible to do remote alarm management with on-premise servers.
5. How does fault detection of top alarms without remediation work? Critical alarm technology is the first step in the fault detection process. When paired with an automated escalation tree that requires acknowledgment, you, your team and your building partners can jump on remediation faster and more productively. Alarm management is most effective when paired with simple building analytics to identify and pre-emptively manage building performance discrepancies.

A critical alarm management system supports proactive, predictive and preventative maintenance so building systems continue to operate without disruption or potentially catastrophic failures. More than a simple notification system, critical alarm management plays a central role in improving research continuity, resiliency, and sustainability – and can be built into your company’s Green Labs, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and risk management plans.

Critical Alarm Messenger Delivers the Advantages of Smart Technology

When considering the use of smart technology and critical notifications it is important to prioritize requirements. Critical Alarm Messengers that are IOT powered and cloud-based, enable ease of access to information while also ensuring uptime. Critical alarms typically need to be received around the clock, so when integrating with an existing BMS, critical alarms get to the right user, to facilitate fast acknowledgement of the notifications. If the user does not response to the notification, an escalation to the next person on the list must occur swiftly to ensure prompt remediation. Lastly, any alarm solution should be designed for end-in-mind analytics. These analytics support organizations to make informed decisions that drives operational improvements across commercial building portfolios.

Take a Step Forward and Manage Your Building Alarms in a Different Way

Transitioning to a better for critical alarm management can be done using a step-by-step approach, with a clear path to:

• Understand the true bottom-line cost of current alarm management approach.
• Identify and prioritize critical systems and alarms for each lab or building in the portfolio.
• Identify the appropriate personnel to be notified for each critical alarm.
• Develop an escalation process to make sure alarms are quickly remediated.
• Continually review alarm analytics to support ongoing improvements.

About the Author & Organization

Tony Tarara joined the Albireo Energy team in 2017 and continues to play a central role in the company’s growth. As the Building Systems Performance Expert based in Boston, Tony has extensive experience in the mission-critical space, including pharmaceutical labs, hospitals, data centers, and commercial offices. With a Mechanical Engineering degree from Northeastern University, his expertise covers HVAC, control design, and energy optimization, leveraging vertical experience. Tony works for Albireo, a leading independent building controls and energy services provider, a company that offers the smart technology needed to embrace a more strategic, proactive, and effective approach to alarm system management.  Albireo Energy has a developed platform, Critical Alarm Messenger (CALM), which offers the smart technology needed to embrace a more strategic, proactive, and effective approach to alarm system management.