Caused by the constantly progressing digitalization in engineering, a significant demand for information about characteristic process and state variables of technical systems arises, e.g. as basis for digital twins or predictive maintenance. However, since it is oftentimes neither obvious what nor how to measure, the integration of measuring functions, in particular in terms of a retrofit, represents a current major challenge in mechanical engineering. In order to overcome this challenge, an approach for the systematic identification of potential measurands is provided in this contribution. For this purpose, the approach of physical effect catalogs is taken up and used for the systematic identification of potential measurands, starting from a physical variable to be determined. Existing catalog systems have two major limitations with respect to the intended identification of cause-effect relationships: on the one hand, existing effect catalogs assume an effect to be realized and not a cause and, on the other hand, a consideration of design parameters of a technical system is not intended. These limitations are overcome by linking the basic ideas of existing catalog systems with the fundamentals of multipole-based modeling. In this way, a multipole-based effect catalog system is developed. The developed catalog system creates the basis to systematically include the changes and transformations of a process or state variable to be determined in a technical system into the identification of potential measurands.