There is a monumental amount of hazards present in the petroleum, natural gas, and petrochemical industries, and these can be fatally dangerous to personnel and irreversibly impactful to the environment. These many threats, including falls, vehicle or equipment collisions, and explosions, can be the result of faulty equipment, and thus, a major way to prevent them is by guaranteeing the reliability of such equipment over time.
However, methods utilizing the basic brainpower of human knowledge might not be enough for this, and recorded empirical data can provide the means to determine truly reliable solutions. The latest revision of ISO 14224:2016 – Petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries – Collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment meets this need, not only providing a comprehensive basis for collecting reliability and maintenance (RM) data, but also establishing the methods for doing so in a standard format that can easily be exchanged between different groups and organizations.
In addition, ISO 14224:2016 is applicable to all types of equipment used in the petroleum, petrochemical, and natural gas industries. This includes process equipment and piping, safety equipment, subsea equipment, pipeline systems, loading/unloading equipment, downhole well equipment and drilling equipment, etc.
Users of the standard are to collect data through a variety of observational procedures. The quality of this data should be determined through the specific importance of the observed item to the overall data collection. If a particular piece of equipment is essential to the work performed, then it should be given a greater level of detail through data-collecting observations. With the appropriate prioritization in order, users of ISO 14224:2016 should prepare a plan for the data collection process and adequately train workers for completing that process.
Ultimately, the collected data should comprise equipment data, failure data, and maintenance data. This is to be used for reliability, availability or efficiency, maintenance, and safety.
Organizing the collected reliability and maintenance data into the standard system is especially important for data exchange, since the act of transferring data is often a necessity for the analysis of that data. The procedures following data collection often need to be done externally, or at least within another department of an organization, and the standard system for RM data allows for this by providing a “reliability thesaurus” for various quantitative and qualitative applications. The exchange of data between different organizations can even benefit the industries overall.
And, while the collection of reliability and maintenance for equipment in the petroleum, petrochemical, and natural gas industries does prevent the likelihood of some kind of catastrophic event fatally harming workers and damaging the environment, most failure events are often harmless. However, while reducing the threats posed by these low-probability, high-risk events, the RM data collection practices of ISO 14224:2016 are important for reducing the need for regular maintenance and fixes that occur from common failures over the equipment’s life cycle. The sustainable improvements in reliability from the collection and analysis of reliability and maintenance data almost always guarantee a reduction in repair costs over time.
To gain an understanding on how the content of this standard applies to a specific type of equipment, users should refer to Annex A of the document. In addition, even though ISO 14224:2016 is intended primarily for collecting data and not analyzing it, Annex D does cover some guidance on the analysis of RM data.
ISO 14224:2016 is the third edition of the standard, and includes the following revisions made to the previous version:
- Clause 3 – Several new definitions
- Clauses 8 and 9 – Changes in some figures and tables
- Annex A – New equipment classes
- Annex B – Associated new and aligned failure modes
- Annex C – Some changes and new subclauses, e.g. C.3.4 and C.7
- Annex D – New subclause D.5
- Annex E – New KPIs (key performance indicators)
- Annex F – Alignment with ISO/TR 12489:2013
ISO 14224:2016 – Petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries – Collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment is now available on the ANSI Webstore.
