Combining regulatory and ergonomic approaches to maintenance outsourcing with a prevention objective

Maintenance activities are critical to both systems reliability and operators’ health and safety. They are also very largely outsourced. Yet, relationships between maintenance outsourcing and operators’ health and safety remain poorly documented and the different forms of maintenance outsourcing have rarely been defined or studied. This paper aims to extend knowledge of these different forms of maintenance outsourcing and to enhance prevention of risks related to these activities by combining regulatory and ergonomic approaches. As a first step, the French contractual and regulatory framework for outsourced maintenance operations was examined, insofar as it should allow the identification of different forms of contracting maintenance operations. In particular, it enabled the main private law maintenance contracts (autonomous maintenance, linked maintenance and subcontracting) to be identified and, on this basis, different forms of maintenance outsourcing to be distinguished. This examination also reveals that maintenance outsourcing is approached by various regulations, which may be difficult to appropriate, and that reticular maintenance organization or risks related to multiplicity of stakeholders are little addressed. As a second step, the network of maintenance contractors used by an operating company for its production equipment was identified, and the nature of the contractual relationships with each of these companies was characterized according to the findings of the first step. To this end, interviews were conducted with various employees of the operating company. Results highlight a network of maintenance contractors that was changing, distributed and relatively complex, and the use of various contracting forms. As a third step, observations of some maintenance operations, chosen to be differentiated according to their outsourcing form, were carried out. They gave rise to clinical analyses of some situations involving contractor employees and operating company in-house personnel, for which a “critical” event related to task allocation, succession of activities or exchanges of information occurred. An analysis of such a situation, in which an ambiguity regarding task distribution among the operating and contracting companies occurred, is presented. It reveals various contributing factors and expose implications for working conditions, health and safety of employees. These findings are specifically discussed in relation to reticular organizations of firms. They prompt a number of suggestions for occupational risk prevention, aimed at both developing regulated safety and promoting managed safety.