Ask a search engine or a generative AI about "maintenance 4.0," and you'll get a discourse centered on performance, data and reducing production interruptions. One point is almost always missing: safety. That observation was the starting point for the session by Jean-Claude Hippomene, CEO - Maintenance Digitalization Expert (Nerya), a vendor specializing in digitizing maintenance interventions, alongside Édouard Salaté, an independent consultant, at the Tech For Industry Show.

Founded in 2018, Nerya works with major accounts operating in environments where safety stakes are at their highest: gas storage (with one client representing around a quarter of France's gas reserves), strategic hydrocarbon reserves, refineries, mining, defense (the entire French navy fleet reportedly uses the software, according to the speaker), chemicals, and Europe's largest nuclear site. The company says it has worked with more than 1,000 companies to date.

The speaker briefly traces the evolution of industrial maintenance: first a "firefighter" mode, repairing as fast as possible with no real consideration for safety; then the arrival of preventive maintenance, which naturally incorporated safety considerations while reducing costs and incidents; then the widespread adoption of CMMS software. Today's ongoing digitalization wave promises more data and performance — but safety, according to the speaker, remains largely absent from these discussions, to the point that Nerya positions itself as one of the few players championing this specific topic at the show.

The heart of the demonstration rests on a recurring field observation: even at sites equipped with numerous software tools, the safety component is often still managed with paper forms of every color.

CMMS effectively covers maintenance preparation: generating work orders, capitalizing on past experience, preparing parts, planning, costs. This foundation is now well mastered by many companies.

Production systems have historically been isolated from other tools, notably out of fear that excessive connectivity could, in the event of a hack, allow remote manipulation of sensitive equipment (valves, etc.) at large-scale sites. Yet production information remains essential for a well-prepared maintenance intervention: scheduling constraints to avoid disrupting operations, terms for making equipment available, and the condition and hazard level of the equipment involved (an empty tank versus one containing a hazardous product, for example).

Prevention plans, joint prior inspections, certifications, risk analyses, work permits, co-activity management: the documentation burden tied to safety is substantial, and generally managed by a dedicated piece of software, completely disconnected from both the production system and the CMMS.

One last blind spot: in France, around 80% of maintenance interventions are outsourced to external contractors. Yet it's these contractors who do the actual field work and hold the know-how needed to properly describe the operations to be carried out — a key factor in incident prevention. However, often for reasons tied to data confidentiality, these companies remain largely excluded from digital tools and, in many cases, continue relying on standard office tools.

Rather than offering a single, all-encompassing tool, Nerya builds its solution around three complementary building blocks that connect with the existing CMMS: a reference module for the prevention plan, a module dedicated to unit shutdowns (a specific topic, often poorly handled elsewhere), and its core product, which manages the entire execution phase starting from the work order, before sending information back to the CMMS. These tools run in multi-tenant SaaS mode, allowing external contractors to access them, but only the information strictly necessary for their intervention, without affecting the rest of the system.

The speaker also stresses the importance of flexibility: beyond the site-owning company, engineering firms carrying out occasional expansion or modification projects also need to be accommodated, sometimes with very different ways of working.

Several demonstrations, carried out with the authorization of real client sites, concretely illustrate Nerya's approach.

Across a set of underground storage sites comparable to refineries, each country or site keeps its own language, processes and regulations, with fine-grained management of certified personnel moving between sites. The speaker shares a conviction drawn from experience: rather than top-down, uniform safety standardization, it's important for field practices to feed back up and adapt the system to each site's — and sometimes each team's — real context, within a shared framework defined centrally.

At a gas storage site, a dashboard displays 119 interventions in real time, color-coded by risk level and status (launched, paused, not started), with a view of the contractors involved, co-activity zones, and lockout status. An interactive map (orthophotos or plans) makes it possible to precisely visualize where each intervention is taking place, with zoom capability revealing overlaps between different interventions' safety zones.

Each intervention generates a safety zone whose radius depends on the type of work described — a few meters for a painting job, several dozen meters for a lifting operation, for example. The system automatically detects overlaps between these zones and alerts on dangerous combinations (welding near a flammable product, for example).

Nerya highlights an indicator observed among its clients: the intervention utilization rate, meaning the gap between the number of interventions requested by contractors (who tend to request more than necessary to ensure they have work) and the number actually carried out in the field. A rate around 75% is considered good; the speaker mentions having observed rates as low as 25% at some clients before implementing such a system — revealing preparation and coordination time largely wasted on fictitious work.

A concrete example illustrates a common risk: a work permit correctly filled out for an operation involving an aerial platform, but a prevention plan drafted separately (sometimes by a different person) that only mentions electrical risks, without referencing the platform's use. In the event of an incident and an inspection, this documentary inconsistency exposes the company. Nerya's system automatically checks this type of consistency — date validity, matching risks described across different documents — without the user needing to reread every document.

When preparing an intervention, the maintenance operator retains an irreplaceable responsibility: precisely describing the work to be carried out (type of welding, use of an aerial platform or scaffold, etc.). Based on this description, the system automatically suggests associated risks and required measures or permits (excavation permit, lifting plan, hot work permit, etc.), and checks the validity of the designated workers' certifications. The speaker stresses that the goal isn't to automate everything, including with AI, but to preserve the operator's vigilance and judgment.

An example of a performance gain is shared: a plant that grew from 8 to 70 employees in two years saw its safety team overwhelmed, with every request — even minor ones — requiring the same number of sign-offs as a critical operation. The solution consisted of precisely identifying the types of work that genuinely require a safety review (confined space, lifting, etc.), so as to focus safety experts' attention where it adds the most value.

On the Rennes automated metro, cited as an example, certain periods or zones need to be protected from any maintenance intervention due to operational constraints (crowding, events). The system makes it possible to enter these constraints in advance, with the ability to distinguish a strict block from a simple warning, along with exceptions for urgent interventions — preventing a planner from discovering too late that a scheduled intervention will be rejected.

Lockout (the industrial equivalent of cutting power with a padlock to prevent accidental restart) is traditionally managed in a siloed way by energy type (electrical, mechanical), with different forms and signatories. Nerya offers a single lockout file bringing together all the energies involved in a given intervention, with real-time progress tracking via digital terminals — allowing production teams, in particular, to know immediately when equipment becomes available again, rather than waiting for someone to return from a physical round.

This session illustrates an often underestimated challenge of industrial digital transformation: safety cannot remain the poor relation of maintenance 4.0. By connecting CMMS, production and safety — without forgetting the contractors who carry out the majority of interventions — Nerya shows that it's possible to gain both in safety and in operational performance, with concrete gains such as reduced coordination meeting time or an improved intervention utilization rate.

Watch the full session, along with the other Tech For Industry Show replays, on our dedicated page.