Asset Management Insights. Celso de Azevedo

of these transfers has probably applied to IT services, but they are also happening in the industrial maintenance sector.

      The market share of outsourced industrial maintenance is in constant augmentation. This means that organizations have become aware that they could delegate those specific tasks that external agents could realize more efficiently and at a lesser cost. This practice has encountered such success that industries have gone a step further, transferring ever more of their activities to outsourced companies in order to attempt to simultaneously transfer the responsibilities inherently tied with the risks. However, the standards that apply at the moment state that only the corporate director may be deemed accountable for risk; hence, we can see through the illusion embodied by the “performance contracts” whose results are made up of parameters that may by no means be tied with a subcontractor’s responsibility, in terms of social or legal accountability. This approach is therefore practically limited in terms of performance, due to the fact that organizations lack a normative frame suited to their wishes.

      The ISO set of standards (in our case the ISO 5500X) have emerged in this complex context. They have acted as a true game changer by integrating within their management systems the notion of outsourcing. The ISO standards’ approach consists of defining a frame in which a free but aligned practice of outsourcing may be exercised. In short, one can consider that organizations who seek to obtain the ISO certification are entitled to purchase and outsource any service or product, so long as they ensure that their management systems are totally aligned with their subcontractor’s (and vice-versa). Thus, these standards regard outsourcing as an integrated extension of the organizations’ management system within which the alignment of operating modes is the foremost priority. It is therefore required that the subcontractor take part in the virtuous circle realized by the organization in its process of continuous improvement. These ISO standards mark a first external effort to implant more systemic and sustainable conceptions in the procurement sector.

      It is also necessary to discuss the inherent subjectivity, which is tied to the procurement function and which comes with a heavy consequence: that of divergent appraisals. I recently overheard an old friend, himself a purchasing manager and a specialist of the supply chain, assert that the industrial world is faced “with a real problem when it comes to assessing purchases because there are no buyers’ schools,” or at least, not in the sense that there are “engineer schools” or “manager schools.” There are, in fact, a few specialized degrees and MBAs—but we must admit that this role is all too rarely regarded as a fully legitimate segment on its own in the sociological representation of organizations. Furthermore, the buyer is characterized by his role as an “interface” between the operator (who employs him) and the suppliers with whom he is asked to negotiate. However, it must be understood that these two tribes do not necessarily speak the same language. The operator knows that he needs a performance but he does not necessarily master the expertise required to evaluate the quality of the product or the service that was provided; on the other hand, the manufacturer may not exactly understand his customer’s requirements, or worse yet, he may understand them but be unable to come up with a satisfactory solution.

      Hence, it is not necessarily easy to give long-term guarantees to the purchases made, which is a real problem. All of these notions reinforce the idea that a departitioning of the procurement sphere is in line with the empirical reality.