In a process plant, incidents occur all too often, causing operations staff and engineers to scramble to piece together what occurred. In the past, they relied on process historian trends to try to determine the cause of the event. However, the trend alone is not enough to provide the true picture of what happened.
In order to gain a clear understanding of the cause of the incident, you need to supplement the process trend with the alarm and sequence of event data. In a conventional plant setup, this means that you must travel across the plant to pick up the paper alarm and events log that is printed from the control system. Only then, armed with a record of what actually happened, are you ready to begin the task of determining what went wrong, and - most importantly - why.