ISO 14224 defines the standard for equipment taxonomy or the grouping of equipment in order to collect and disseminate good maintenance and reliability data in order to manage any maintenance or reliability organization effectively. Collection of good equipment data is key to any failure elimination and mitigation program or maintenance management program.

1. Equipment Taxonomy – ISO 14224
Where do you start when establishing your equipment hierarchy in order to retrieve good data
to manage your reliability and maintenance or your assets?
“In absence of a standard we have chaos”
The taxonomy is a systematic classification of items into generic groups based on factors possibly common
to several of the items (location, use, equipment subdivision etc.). A classification of relevant data to be
collected by this International Standard is represented by a hierarchy shown in Figure 4.
Definitions of each segment are provided below, in addition to examples of different Business Streams and
Equipment Types as illustrated in Table 2.

2. Levels 1 to 5 are a high level categorization that relates to industries and plant application regardless of the
equipment units being involved. This because an equipment unit (e.g. pump) may be used in many different
industries and plant configurations, and for analyzing the reliability of similar equipment the operating context is
needed. Taxonomy information on these levels (1 to 5) shall be included in the database for each equipment unit as
‘Use/location data’ (see Table 5).
Partial copy of Table 5
Levels 6 to 9 are related to the equipment unit (Inventory) with subdivision in lower indenture levels in a parent- child
relationship. The number of levels for subdivision will depend on the complexity of the equipment unit and the use of
the data. A single instrument may need no further breakdown, while several levels are required for a compressor. For
data used in availability analyses, the reliability at the equipment class level may be the only desirable data needed,
while an RCM analysis and root cause analysis will need data on failure mechanism at component/maintainable item,
or parts, level. This International Standard does not address level 9 in particular.
A Copy of ISO 14224 – Maintenance and Reliability Data for Oil and Gas (this ISO standards is used by most industries in
the world) I highly recommend purchasing this standard from ISO at:
http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=36979
It will be the best money you ever spent.