Standard third-party packages

Kerridge has provided an excellent article on the interface betw een the operating company and the contractor to define all requirements in complete and standardized detail. This includes who is responsible for every deliverable. The operating company and contractor must work as a team. An example of one area that needs to be reviewed often with the contractor is the provision of secondary systems as packages, perhaps from a third party. Such systems can easily become orphans. This problem is discussed in the Process Definition section of Chapter 16. 

Another item of concern regarding Standard Software Packages is that the package by itself may not be Part 11 compliant. An example of this is a package that does not have Part 11-compliant audit trails functionality. In this case, the Standard Software package may need to be combined with third-party applications and/or plug-ins, in order to make it compliant with Part 11. 

There are a number of commercial alarm management systems available. Some features are often already built into the DCS as standard. Others require the addition of a package -maybe from a third party. These are not a substitute for an ongoing review of alarm statistics, but they do add useful functionality. They can be particularly useful in identifying repeating nuisance and long-standing alarms. 

IEEE http //www.ieee.org (accessed October 12, 2010). Standards may be purchased directly through the IEEE Web site as well as through third-party vendors. All current IEEE standards are included in the lEL/IEEE Xplore package described above. 

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