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“In the nature of things, nothing man-made is indestructible, but performing repairs at intervals by an activity known as maintenance can extend useful life” Dhillon, et. al. (2006, p. 21). Maintenance at regular intervals is required to keep the equipment in good condition and get the desired output, performing maintenance requires resources in the form of manpower and spares which add to operating costs. The need to reduce operating cost increases due to competition, and it requires a strategy. The availability of production resources is directly related to the effectiveness of maintenance activities; there are different approaches and techniques which could be implemented to achieve the required level of availability.

The step by step process involved in risk based maintenance (RBM) method is very effective in identifying risk and in turn assists in developing a maintenance strategy based on risk; this reduces the downtime while avoids wasting resources on maintenance where it is not needed. The two factors used to decide the risk are criticality of components and likelihood of failure for each component.

Neely, et al. (1995, p. 80) ‘‘Performance measurement is a topic which is often discussed but rarely defined’’. In order to retain the consistency of any process it’s important that measure the performance and there should be a provision to deal with the shift from the acceptable values in KPI’s. Balanced score card method is used to determine the key performance indicators.

The maintenance policy shall be determined by the fault characteristics, Salonen (2009) i.e. the distribution of fault over a period of time and how the fault develops (gradually or immediately).

The thesis was written based on the case study conducted at the feed water system of boiler number 4 at Mälarenergi . Recommendations according to the research questions are given at the end of the thesis report.