European and international maintenance standards

While standardization is particularly concerned with products, to which it confers levels of confidence with regard to users, it is also, and increasingly, of interest to services, whose economic weight is now becoming preponderant . Maintenance is one of these, since it provides the technical and intellectual capacity to keep an asset in the required condition, thus satisfying the needs of its user and owner. For companies, it is a vital process involving activities that call on a variety of interacting skills, and which need to be supported by reference documents.

Since the early 1980s, maintenance standards have been regularly produced and updated, making it one of the pioneers of standardization in the service sector. These documents, which are gradually covering the entire field, play an essential role in promoting this activity, which employs some 450,000 people in France and is worth almost 40 billion euros in industry and the real estate/tertiary sector, according to studies carried out by the French Association of Maintenance Engineers and Managers (AFIM) .

Standards facilitate exchanges between stakeholders, firstly by defining a common language, and then by formulating recognized methods and practices for achieving the expected levels of safety, quality, competitiveness and respect for environmental and social constraints. It can therefore be said that they help to raise awareness of the essential role of maintenance in today's unavoidable drive towards sustainable development, and of the growing importance of this market in the future.

The purpose of this article is to supplement the previously published "Contexte normatif et réglementaire de la maintenance" ( ), which describes the work of AFNOR's...