PPS Outsourcing Advisory.
Governance-led advisory for chemical, pharmaceutical, and energy operators externalizing safety-critical work.
Bought, not built — and quietly un-governed.
Treated as procurement, this looks efficient. Treated as governance, it exposes a problem most boards never see until something fails: outsourcing the execution of a safety task does not transfer accountability for its outcome. Under Seveso III, OSHA PSM, and comparable regimes, the operator remains the sole duty holder — regardless of who did the work.
It moves into the space between what a vendor executes and what an operator still owns. We call this the Grey Zone, and it is where most outsourced-safety failures originate — not in the technical work itself, but in the unexamined assumption that buying a report buys protection.
For the executive carrying the duty of care, three pressures converge: rising regulatory exposure, a shrinking internal bench unable to challenge external work, and a procurement model that rewards deliverables over outcomes. Left unmanaged, the organization slowly becomes a “blind customer” — dependent on vendors it can no longer intelligently question.
Execution is delegable. Accountability is not.
Map the Grey Zone before the contract is signed.
We classify each candidate activity against a three-layer model — Execution (fully outsourceable), Verification (shared), and Accountability (non-delegable) — so the boundary between the vendor's “doing” and your “owning” is explicit before work begins, not litigated after an incident.
Design the governance and accountability model.
We build the decision-rights structure — who provides input data, who challenges assumptions, who formally accepts residual risk — and translate it into contract language that positions vendor outputs as advisory inputs, never as final decisions.
Structure provider selection and oversight.
We bring discipline to how providers are evaluated, contracted, and assured over time — shifting the relationship from vendor management to technical governance.
Preserve internal design authority.
We help you retain the minimum internal expertise required to challenge external work intelligently — because an organization that cannot explain the logic behind a vendor's recommendation has already lost control of it.
Five outcomes a duty holder can defend.
Specialized capability without fixed headcount
Access to scarce safety expertise without carrying it permanently on the balance sheet.
Defensible regulatory posture
A documented governance chain that demonstrates the duty holder exercised real oversight — not procurement theater.
Reduced — not relocated — risk
The Grey Zone made visible, mapped, and governed rather than left to emerge after an event.
A retained ability to challenge
Enough internal authority that you remain an intelligent customer, not a blind one.
Board-level clarity
A structure CEOs, operations leaders, procurement, and legal can each see their role in.
Where strategy meets the duty to operate.
That framing comes from having operated, not only advised.
DJC is led by a principal with more than twenty years in senior process-safety and externalization roles inside global chemical and pharmaceutical operators, and is independently certified under the German statutory regime that governs major-incident accountability.
The result is an advisory firm small enough to engage with judgment, and credentialed enough to challenge external work on its merits.
Led by Dr. Mohammed Jimoh — see leadershipRepresentative engagements.
The framework, in full.
The Grey Zone of Vendor Responsibility in Process & Plant Safety
The three-layer accountability model, the responsibility trap, and a governance playbook for leaders carrying the license to operate.
Weighing a safety-critical outsourcing decision?
A direct conversation is the fastest way to know whether your current vendor setup reduces risk or merely relocates it. We can begin with a governance assessment against the three-layer model.