Study: 99% of ATG Alarms May Just Be Noise

Over the last few decades, fuel tank systems have become increasingly complicated to monitor and manage, adding to the already significant load felt by fueling station managers. While much of this complexity can be attributed to the proliferation of double-walled tanks to comply with environmental regulations, it is further augmented by new industry standards for compliance and advanced technologies and solutions for monitoring them. The ensuing intricacy has provided the liquid fuel downstream industry with an ever-growing mountain of information to process.

As your inbox quickly fills up with alerts triggered by the many sensors placed in your fuel tanks, you may soon find yourself overwhelmed by overdue tasks and lose perspective of the health of your systems. Information is a powerful asset until you have far too much of it. Then it quickly becomes noise, lacking insights or ability to act.

There is no doubt that automated fuel tank monitoring is the smart way to ensure safety, compliance, and efficiency. But your monitoring system is just your first defense from critical safety, efficiency, and compliance issues. The second defense comes from managing your response to those alarms.

Case Study: 700 sites, 30,000 alarms

At Titan Cloud, we analyzed 30,000 tank systems at over 10,000 fueling facilities in an effort to understand the scope of problems that they were having. The sheer number of automated alarms generated by ATG systems doubled over our three-year analysis period and is set to surpass the 4 million mark this year.

But it turns out that not all of these alarms are worthy of dispatching a service call. In fact, most are not. Far too many are the result of misconfigured alarm systems, resulting in false alarms, testing activity, unnecessary maintenance trips, wasted hours, and a distorted view of your system. Even when you think your system is properly configured, you may find that your threshold settings were changed after a system outage or repair and no longer reflect the correct setting you intended for them. Without conducting a site-by-site audit of your system and sensors, how do you know which alarms require action?

For example, our assessment of one fueling chain comprising 700 sites showed that nearly 30,000 alarms were detected over the course of just 60 days. Our analysis of those alarms showed that only:

• Only 17,000 were compliance-related issues
• Of those, only about 2,000 were actionable issues
• Of those, only about 350 required a field service dispatch
• That’s only about 1% of all the alarms detected

You may be wondering about the other 99 percent. Well, often, alarms can be sounded by a faulty sensor, fuel system testing, a wiring issue, or system connectivity issues. While important to address, these are the types of alarms that, once triggered, are prone to be repeatedly sent to one’s inbox until they get fixed. And, while they may not indicate a problem with the tank, they do add to the overall noise that a facilities manager has to deal with.

Integrated tech cuts through the noise

Poorly configured systems lead to costly alarm overkill and wasted resources. An alert management system can help you cut through the noise and zero in on the issues that require immediate attention. By providing remote access to all your data and compliance records, and the ability to remotely monitor and troubleshoot alarms, you will have the tools for cutting through the noise and distinguishing between real emergencies and false alarms.

Titan Cloud offers solutions to sift through all these noisy distractions. Our AI-assisted tools can quickly analyze all of your alarms to give you a quick snapshot of your system that focuses on your most critical needs first. We have solutions for alarm management, remote ATG management, compliance documentation management, remote leak detection and more. And best of all, our tools are hardware agnostic, so they will work with the systems you already own.

Titan Cloud can also provide your company a personalized ATG system and alarm configuration assessment that will compare your alarm data to the latest industry standards and provide recommendations on how you can optimize your system for efficiency, compliance, and performance.

Sign up for your Personalized Alarm and Configuration Assessment with a Titan Cloud
Expert. In this one-hour session, you can expect:

• Overview of best-practice alarm management
• Benefits from Alarm AI and Configuration Management
• Current state vs. future state recommendations

Brent Puzak

VP of Solutions Consulting

Brent brings 25 years' industry experience to Titan Cloud as the Vice President of Solutions Consulting. He led environmental shared services for a global retail chain with over 9,000 locations, moving through numerous leadership positions. Brent's diverse background and knowledge allows him to take a strategic approach to addressing complex industry challenges.