Maintenance 4.0: What if safety weren't a hindrance, but the heart of the system?

At the Tech For Industry trade show, Jean-Claude Hippomène (Nerya) shared a conviction born of more than a thousand factory visits: Maintenance 4.0 has come a long way, but it has neglected safety. This article expands on his presentation.

The test is simple. Type “maintenance 4.0” into an AI search engine. You’ll hear about equipment availability, real-time data, and performance. One word is conspicuously absent: security. This is the starting point for Nerya’s presentation—and a telling anomaly. In the field, security isn’t an option you add once everything else is working. It’s the very prerequisite for the operation.

Safety: the missing link in the industrial narrative

For a long time, “maintenance” meant fixing things as quickly as possible, in a “firefighting” mode. Then came preventive maintenance, CMMS systems, and a more mature culture of risk management. Today, a new wave is emerging: more sensors, more data, and faster speeds. This shift is exciting. But in this race for performance, safety is often treated as a separate issue—a requirement to be met rather than an integral part of performance.

This disconnect has a tangible consequence. Many stakeholders view “safety first” as important, but also as a hindrance. Yet safety that slows things down is safety that gets circumvented. The real question isn’t choosing between moving fast and working safely, but advancing both at the same time.

The real problem: the silo effect

When you take a close look at a project, you rarely find a lack of software. Instead, we find the opposite: numerous tools that don’t communicate with one another. Maintenance plans operations in its CMMS. Production controls its facilities separately, often in isolation for cybersecurity reasons. Security has its own software. And in the end, on the shop floor, paper forms of every color are used for permits and lockout/tagout procedures.

One player is almost always left out of the digital equation: the outside contractor. In France, nearly 80% of service calls are outsourced. This means that contractors operate the equipment and know how the work should be done, but—lacking access to the systems—they rely on office software. Everyone prepares on their own. Co-activity is only discovered in the morning, on-site, when the equipment has already been rented and the teams have already been dispatched.

Integrate safety into the workflow, not on top of it

Nerya’s proposal boils down to one idea: breaking down silos so that safety is built into the maintenance process, rather than added as an afterthought. The process begins with the work order generated by the CMMS. The equipment, its characteristics, and its hazards are thus already known. The person preparing the work has only one task: to describe the job precisely. The rest follows naturally, from risk identification to verified authorizations and permits issued at the right time.

This approach also protects against a subtle flaw: inconsistency in documentation. A prevention plan drafted by one person, a permit issued by another, and an actual intervention that does not correspond exactly to either. When an incident occurs, it is this chain that is examined. When each step builds on the previous one, consistency ceases to be a last-minute check. Coactivity follows the same principle: each operation generates a safety zone proportional to the work being performed, and the system alerts users when two zones overlap.

What this means in practice

The value of such an approach is measured by results. At a classified site managing up to 119 simultaneous work orders, the daily coordination meeting has been reduced from 45 to 15 minutes, with reports sent automatically. At a rapidly growing factory, the team has expanded from 8 to 70 people without safety becoming a bottleneck. And when contractors report in real time whether they are on-site, the utilization rate of work permits rises significantly—whereas at some sites, up to three-quarters of work permits were prepared for tasks that would never take place. Better coordination means putting an end to waste.

A conviction rather than a demonstration

The most successful Maintenance 4.0 is not the one that piles on the most technology. It is the one that brings maintenance, production, safety, and external contractors together to work toward a shared vision. Safety then ceases to be an obstacle and becomes a driver of industrial performance, serving people as much as it does operations.

The full presentation, delivered at the Tech For Industry trade show, explores these ideas with examples drawn from real-world sites. We invite you to watch it above.

To learn more. Do you manage maintenance operations at a site with high safety stakes? Let’s discuss how to integrate prevention, concurrent operations, and work permits into a single workflow.

Contact the Nerya teams