Interactions between maintenance and production and safety. Bibliographical study 2. Functional and organizational relationship: characterisation and consequences for safety

For a long time, maintenance operations have been identified as "critical" situations where safety is concerned. This critical aspect results not only from the nature of these activities but also from their organizational context and from interactions between maintenance and production operators. Consequently, and given that few studies have been devoted to maintenance, we have conducted some research into the interactions between maintenance and production and their consequences for reliability and safety.
Within this framework, a bibliographical analysis was made. It was aimed primarily at acquiring knowledge about maintenance activities and identifying, on this basis, some characteristics of these activities contributing to their criticality. Secondly, we considered functional and organizational relationships of maintenance and production and their effects on the safety of maintenance activities. Finally, we investigated the interactions between the operators concerned and their potential consequences.
This paper concerns the second of these objectives. Firstly, functional relationships between maintenance and production are specified. Then, their organizational relationships are considered : the different political choices which could be made by firms in this domain and the various types of maintenance task allocation (specialized, integrated or shared maintenance). Lastly, their consequences for operators' safety are discussed.