A SCADA control room operator for a gas producer faces hundreds of alarms daily from over 800 wells, but the alarms have no standard prioritization, making it difficult for the operator to identify and respond to critical issues. A SCADA implementation project by a major oil and gas company partnered a software vendor and automation consultant to standardize alarm management, data tagging, and screen displays across multiple facilities. By building on existing standards within the company for health, safety, and environmental protocols and historian databases, the project resulted in uniform alarm prioritization and data naming across sites in different regions with no downtime.

1. Picture a SCADA control room operator monitoring well
pads for more than 800 wells and associated production
facilities, including assets recently acquired from another gas
producer. Each day, this operator faces hundreds of alarms,
as each well may have as many as 25 monitored points trig-
gering alarms representing various response levels ranging
from maintenance to critical HSE issues. Now imagine these
alarms have no standard prioritization. A level-10 alarm
could require either immediate response or signify a routine
event. How can the operator identify and respond to the
most critical alarm when so much translation is required?
As SCADA systems are installed, a priority level or rating
must be assigned to each. Without a process, guidelines, or
an intimate working knowledge of the field and each well,
this assignment is a daunting task and often results in arbi-
trary or incorrect prioritizations, resulting in confusion.
Given the level of customization available in leading
SCADA systems, it can appear that the problem has an easy
fix. However, a solution requires time and is a combination
of context and expertise. Organization-wide standardization
of SCADA functions such as displays, data tagging, reporting,
and alarming remains an industry ideal; however, often it
competes with the realities of daily field operations. The
challenge lies in balancing standardization or “enterprise
standards” while maintaining production.
Moving toward the ideal
SCADA standardization is ideal because it makes business
sense. Operations cannot be optimized if personnel are
required to translate and reconcile disparate views of a com-
mon asset. To achieve optimal production, organizations
must focus on more effective use of human assets.
For personnel to work most efficiently, they need reliable,
accurate, and timely data presented in the same method and
format, whether the well pad is located in South America or
South Texas. The ultimate goal of SCADA implementation is
to deliver “actionable information” – data in context to the
user’s role that enables informed decisions.
Software, service partnership
Consider the case of one supermajor’s SCADA standardiza-
tion project using CygNet software. As one of the world’s
leading petrochemical companies, the company wanted to
add assets to its operations in a more efficient and standard-
ized fashion. A partnership between the SCADA technology
vendor and an oilfield automation provider led to the pro-
ject’s success.
CygNet’s Enterprise Operations Platform (EOP) collects,
manages, and distributes large amounts of real-time and his-
torical data from field, production, and business systems, giv-
ing users at all organizational levels the information needed
to support daily operations and make informed strategic
decisions. For operational and integration expertise on the
standardization project, the supermajor turned to Glob-
aLogix, a Houston-based oilfield control and automation
company that helps clients improve their data collection,
analysis, and reporting processes to achieve greater effi-
ciency and productivity. Outsourcing standardization
allowed the supermajor to remain focused on operations
while the SCADA system was being updated. As a result, they
experienced no downtime during the project.
GlobaLogix began working with the supermajor in 2007 to
expand an existing CygNet SCADA system. As the project
evolved, GlobaLogix’s standardization drive focused on three
primary types of information:
• Alarm management;
• Data tagging, also called data naming conventions;
and
• Human Machine Interface, the set of display screen
templates.
GlobaLogix’s goal was to design and implement a standard
system that would align with the data and reporting needs of
SCADA standardization
across the enterprise
Partnership between software vendor and automation consultant yields standardiza-
tion across fields and greater operational efficiency with no downtime.
By Steve Robb, CygNet Software

2. the field operator, allowing the company to prioritize alarms,
find and group data, and automate reporting. Work began
with two simultaneous projects. One involved two parallel
control rooms managing 1,200 wells in Texas, and the other
involved a control room in Wyoming that oversaw 800 wells.
While both were managed by the supermajor, mission-criti-
cal functions such as alarm management and data naming
conventions were determined independently at each facility.
This made collaboration difficult and tasks, such as alarm
prioritizing, overwhelming.
From alarming to monitoring: getting on the
same screen
GlobaLogix’s method to solving alarm management issues
illustrates the company’s pragmatic approach to defining
enterprise standards. The CygNet platform allows operators
to assign alarm importance on a scale of zero to 99. This left
prioritization to the subjective judgment of individual opera-
tors, causing inconsistent coding processes. GlobaLogix cre-
ated a coding system based on the supermajor’s HSE
protocol, already prominently posted in each of the facilities,
to align the alarm management system with
the company’s existing standard for prioritiz-
ing consequence-oriented events.
Building on existing work, alarms now are
coded uniformly across the supermajor’s US
facilities according to three criteria: type of
consequence, severity, and risk level.
A second component of the standardiza-
tion project involved data tagging and nam-
ing conventions. Common data semantics
are critical for efficient SCADA operations to
ensure system-wide data integrity and to
power accurate time-series analysis.
First, GlobaLogix examined how each
data type was employed and shared. This
approach uncovered another existing
framework – the historian database already
in use at the customer’s home office. By
referencing its data hierarchy, an opera-
tional reading such as wellhead pressure
now carries the same data tag ID, facility
ID, etc., when displayed on any SCADA
screen in any location.
Finally, the SCADA standardization proj-
ect tackled the human-machine interface
(HMI) screen templates. With each location running separate
CygNet server instances designed and implemented by local
integrators and operators, none of its HMI screens were uni-
formly designed. Project partners discovered that extensive
standardization work in HMI design previously had been
completed within the company’s offshore operations groups.
The decision was made to build on this work and extend the
standard navigation, color scheme, and tabular format to
visual displays in the US.
The benefits of standardization
Enterprise SCADA standardization helps solve cost prob-
lems and the inefficiencies of disparate approaches to mon-
itoring, measurement, and control of network assets.
Without continued drive toward standardization, operators
must continue to translate alarm conditions instead of
focusing on optimizing production. Leading producers have
learned that their ability to respond to ever-changing market
conditions, meet regulatory compliance mandates, and
ensure the health and safety of their personnel depends on
standardized SCADA controls. I
Using existing HSE protocol, GlobaLogix created a standard alarm coding process
that was input easily into the CygNet SCADA system. This allowed for uniform alarm
prioritization across field locations and paved the way for more efficient alarm
response. (Image courtesy of CygNet)
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