Inaugural report benchmarks alarm performance across manufacturing and examines the last mile gap between alarm detection and human response.
TORONTO, Aug. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — SeQent, a leading provider of industrial alarm notification and plant-floor communication software, today published the 2026 State of Industrial Alarming report. Drawing on more than 70 verified statistics, nine months of field research, and insights from 213 customers, leads, and partners, the 24-page report offers a single, actionable picture of the gap between alarm detection and human response – what SeQent calls the last mile of alarm notification.
The industry has spent two decades refining which alarms should fire. The report finds it never solved who gets called, on what device, with what context, and with what audit trail. While ISA 18.2 defines extensive KPIs for alarm system performance, no published benchmark exists for whether a critical alarm ever reached a person who could act on it.
“The impact of alarm overload has been documented across industry research for years. What nobody had done was pull that data together and ask the obvious question: after the alarm fires, does the right person actually find out?” said Sheret Ross, Co-CEO, SeQent. “We published this report to give operations leaders one honest picture of where the industry stands and a practical way to figure out where they stand within it.”
Highlights from the 2026 State of Industrial Alarming report include:
- Aging notification infrastructure is forcing a modernization decision – Fifty unique voices in SeQent’s field data, spanning automotive, wastewater, pharmaceutical, and semiconductor operations, reported that decades-old paging hardware is reaching end of life with no like-for-like replacement.
- The cost of alarm failure keeps climbing – Downtime losses among Fortune Global 500 companies now total $1.4 trillion annually, with automotive line shutdowns reaching $2.3 million per hour (Siemens, 2024).
- Workforce shortages are compounding alarm overload – Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute project 1.9 million manufacturing jobs potentially unfilled by 2033 – fewer operators managing more alarms.
- Regulation is turning alarm response into an auditable event – A January 2024 OSHA enforcement directive made ISA 18.2 a recognized standard under Process Safety Management, one of several frameworks tightening across pharma, automotive, food and beverage, and utilities.
The report gives manufacturers a practical path forward: a five-stage alarm management maturity journey to locate where their operation stands today, four new metrics for measuring the response rather than just the alarm, and three practical steps any plant can start immediately – baseline notification response time, identify bad actors, and automate escalation for the most critical alarms.
Manufacturers can also benchmark their own operation in three minutes using SeQent’s Alarm Health Scorecard, a companion self-assessment built around the report’s five questions every alarm system should be able to answer.
The full 2026 State of Industrial Alarming report is available for download at https://seqent.com/state-of-industrial-alarming/.
About SeQent
SeQent is a leading provider of industrial alarm notification and plant-floor communication software that helps manufacturers prevent costly downtime and keep operations running at peak performance. For more than three decades, SeQent has supported thousands of plants worldwide by compressing the time between detection and response. Its solutions include wireless alarm and event notification, industrial Wi-Fi messaging, and visual display management. SeQent unifies alarm and event data from SCADA, MES, and PLC systems and delivers it to radios, smartphones, displays, pagers, and PA systems, turning critical alerts into immediate, confirmed action.
We keep the world’s critical operations running – because when systems fail, every second counts.
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SOURCE SeQent Ltd.
