Recent developments in maintenance planning and
management demonstrate that the establishment of optimized
maintenance policies may drastically improve the
performance and reduce the operating cost of facilities.
However maintenance activities are typically outside of the
core business of production facilities, hence enterprises often
fail to catch the opportunities that may originate by properly
optimized management strategies. A strategic maintenance
management should hence encompass the possibility of
outsourcing maintenance activities to ensure the necessary
perfomance of production systems, while allowing
enterprises to concentrate their resources on their core
activities. In order to be effectively undertaken an
outsourcing strategy must be supported by a proper
performance oriented contract. The present paper aims to
provide an adequate methodology to address such issues and
to define a framework for the definition of the relevant
contract variables such as availability levels, penalty
policies, rewards and service cost. The methodology here
proposed is based upon the evaluation of the expected profit
function of both the outsourcer and the provider, by
performing a trade-off analysis on the basis of the
transaction costs