FINtastic Tip: Better Alarm Management for Your Building

A common problem in building management is dealing with an overwhelming number of alarms in your BAS workstation. Seeing all of your alarms at once makes them difficult to manage and troubleshoot efficiently. Not only do you have too many alarms, but many of them are false or unimportant; they clutter up your alarm console.   

Wouldn’t it be great if you could only see the alarms that mattered and could easily address the alarms quickly?

Your FINtastic Tip is you can by using FIN’s Alarm App.

How we display alarms in FIN

The old school way of displaying alarms is by displaying them all in a table across the workstation. In FIN, we display alarms by using badges built into the navigation bar and directory interface. Through the use of badges, we can summarize the number of alarms in the context of the current navigation. 

For example, you’re navigating within a project and your context focus is the floor level, you will see badges related to the equipment in alarm. Using a single mouse, you can link directly to the alarm app and focus down to a piece of equipment. 

Thanks to the Magic Bubbles in FIN (automatic contextual hyperlinks), applications are interrelated. A user can click on an alarm event and see the related applications (via Magic Bubbles) for the piece of equipment the alarm is referencing. These related applications could be used to resolve the issue and are just a mouse click away. For example you could: quickly view the Point Graphics, review the maintenance log in Notes, or check for points that are in Override). 

Alarms on the go

FIN can be configured for email alarm notification so that alarms can be addressed directly from your mobile device when you’re away from your desk. Because FIN was designed using a mobile first strategy, once you receive an alarm notification, you can quickly and easily navigate to the alarm app on your mobile device. You can also troubleshoot with the full functionality of FIN apps such as point graphics, notes, schedules, and overrides right from your phone. 

Eliminating False Alarms

Traditional alarms simply monitor a single point and look at a single condition, which can lead to false alarms. With FIN, our alarms are smart alarms, meaning that they can take into consideration multiple variables and conditions. Our alarms take a more holistic view of a complete system and can avoid false alarms by having a more sophisticated routine to drive their decision process. For example, a high temperature alarm can look at both the temperature and the occupied schedule to intelligently eliminate false alarms during occupied periods. This happens for lots of things. 

Finally, because our smart alarms run inside our control engine, they can also be relativized. Relativized control logic can automatically bind to related equipment, which eliminates the need to copy, paste, and link every alarm routine needed. This means that changes and enhancements to the alarm routine are easily made. 

Learn more about FIN's Alarm app here.

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