Understanding ISO 14224: You Guide to Sustainable Defect Elimination

Capture The Right Failure Data to Power Your Defect Elimination Activities

In the petroleum, natural gas and petrochemical industries, great attention is being paid to safety, reliability, and maintainability of equipment. This is true in any industry and as such the learnings and information found within ISO 14224 can be applied to any industry.

While ISO 14224 was developed for the Petroleum, Natural Gas and Petrochemical industries, the same process can and should be applied in any organization. When implemented, the right data can be gathered to not only eliminate defects from the current assets but be used to design more efficient and reliable equipment. Remember the equipment will only operate at the inherent level of reliability, which is established in the design phase. So by learning from the existing equipment and it’s performance, the designs can be improved to increase the level of inherent reliability.

All of these improvements in design and changes to existing assets need to be validated with the proper analysis. This analysis can only be done when the data is accurate, complete and provided in the right context. The right data with the right context should include;

Asset’s technical characteristics
Operating conditions of the asset
Environmental conditions in which the asset is operated in
Potential failures
Maintenance activities
Failures

Utilizing a standard such as this in a single plant will provide some value, but when utilizing the ISO 14224 approach across multiple sites, or organizations is when the benefits are truly realized. This realization occurs because the amount of data captured grows at a much quicker pace, allowing the analysis to become more meaningful and accurate. With all of this in minds, how can any industry apply ISO 14224 to their industry? First, it is important to understand the ISO standard.

ISO 14224: An Overview

The ISO 14224 standard does cover a significant amount of information. Included in the standard is;

Data Collection Methods
Equipment Boundaries
Taxonomy (See the post of Asset Hierarchy for more information)
Equipment Data
Failure Data
Maintenance Data
Standard Equipment Attributes (specific to oil and gas, but provides an example of what may be required for other types of assets)
Analysis
Requirements of Data
Safety Critical Failure

Benefits of ISO 14224

There are many benefits of implementing or adopting ISO 14224 in any organization. Typically the benefits will materialize in one of the following ways;

Economic – Improved economic performance through improved designs, reduced life cycle cost, reduced downtime and through reduced cost of insurance
General – Operation / Regulatory license, life extension of existing assets, improved quality, improved resource planning.
Safety and Environmental – improved safety, reduced failures, reduced environmental impact through reduced incidents and improved operations and improved compliance.
Analytical – Higher quality data, data-driven decision making, improved acceptance of decisions, the ability to benchmark, the improved predictability of performance and the ability to utilize Risk Based Inspections.

The benefits mentioned above are not exhaustive, and there is much overlap in these benefits. All in all, by not only implementing a strong data capture system, but by utilizing the data through meaningful analysis, can any organization drive significant improve across their organization in many different areas. These benefits can not only be used to build more confidence and buy-in of maintenance and reliability activities but to form a true cross-functional partnership across the organization.

Costs of Implementing ISO 14224

Let’s face it, data collection is an investment. It takes time and resources to develop the right framework, data points, relationships, and analysis methods.

Setup the CMMS (or another system) to capture the data in a repeatable and reliable manner.
Have the frontline staff understand the value of and capture the data

These costs should not be undertaken lightly. They are significant and can drive substantial improvement in any operation. However, what data and how the data is captured, must be defined by the organization. There is no point in capturing certain data if the organization does and will not have the means to analyze the data. The data captured must be fit for purpose and reflect the needs of the organization.

Capturing the Right Data

ISO 14224 breaks down the requirements into 3 primary types of data;

Equipment Data is the description of the equipment level data (level 6 in the taxonomy). This data set consists of;
- Classification Data which includes location, systems, etc
- Equipment Attributes which include the manufacturer design characteristics
- Operational Data which includes the operating mode, criticality, operating environment, etc.
Maintenance Data is the record of corrective and preventive maintenance actions. The maintenance data typically includes;
- Identification data which includes work order number with linkages to the equipment/failure record
- Maintenance data which includes the date of work, the type of work (Preventive), the activity (Lubrication), if the maintenance required equipment downtime, and the specific items maintained
- Maintenance resources which include the maintenance man-hours per discipline and total, and any special equipment/ resources
- Maintenance times which include the active maintenance time, and down time.
Failure Data is the detailed description of the failure that occurred. This data set consists of;
- Identification data which includes. failure record number with linkages to the work order and equipment.
- failure data for characterizing a failure which includes failure date, items failed, failure impact, failure mode, failure cause, and failure detection method.

These three types of data are critical to understanding the impact of the maintenance strategies being deployed along with the ability to analyze the failures.

Using the Failure Data

Armed with the maintenance and failure data, many different types of analysis can be performed depending on the severity of the failure. While not exhaustive, the following analysis can be performed once the data has been collected;

Pareto
Root Cause Analysis
Weibull
Reliability Growth Analysis (Crow-AMSAA)
Markov Analysis
Monte Carlo Simulation

Any one of these analyses can be used to drive operational improvements to the organization. The ISO 14224 standard does cover what data is required to perform each of the analysis but does not cover the analysis itself.

Does your organization have a standard that enables the right data to be captured and used to improve the performance of the organization? If so, what did you do to make it successful? In the next post, I will cover how to apply this in a real-world environment and how to make it easy for the end user to collect the information.

Remember, to find success, you must first solve the problem, then achieve the implementation of the solution, and finally sustain winning results.

I’m James Kovacevic
Eruditio, LLC
Where Education Meets Application
Follow @EruditioLLC

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