**1. Introduction**

Industry implements maintenance schemes based on equipment manufacturers' recommendations that might not be able to generate positive changes throughout the asset's life cycle. For instance, some diesel engines are designed to operate in Europe. Maintenance tasks need to be adjusted to operate in the South American tropics. This also happens with automatic transmissions. These tasks, sometimes, are neither adjusted nor improved. In this sense, several philosophies, methodologies, and standards seek to assist this process; however, most of them do not take into consideration their operation characteristics, production necessity, and other factors that are important to a company.

This chapter presents a modern maintenance strategy proposal aimed to comply with the ISO 55000 series of standards. These strategies are needed to develop a successful and modern maintenance program. In doing so, an appropriate maintenance strategy ought to be defined that will form the foundation for ensuring a high reliability degree of operating production systems. The challenge is to restructure maintenance strategies and, hence, to guarantee a high reliability level of the production system operations. The strategy presented herein was validated in a transport truck public company's policy regarding operational excellence and asset management, achieving satisfactory results.

The concept of "maintenance" in the industry has evolved in the last two decades. It is no longer seen as an expense or a team simply responsible for replacing production system components. Now, maintenance is considered an indispensable activity which guarantees not only the availability and functionality of a system or a component but also the high quality of the goods and services produced [1]. Likewise, in the early years, maintenance has solely been the responsibility of mechanical and electrical engineers. However, managing maintenance activities has become a multidisciplinary and far-reaching task within the organization. Maintenance directly impacts levels of production, budgets, timelines, and forecasted profits. Maintenance also increases the lifetime of equipment and ensures acceptable levels of reliability during usage. This occurs in every step from preventive maintenance through redesign. Moreover, operation teams must adapt to the specifications of each piece of equipment and each industrial need. Critical equipment may not have been manufactured uniquely for the organization's specific facilities, operators, or supplies. Additionally, proper management of equipment lowers operational costs. It reduces energy consumption, maintenance resources themselves (such as spare parts and labor), and risks to system operators, facilities, and production. Overall, managing maintenance activities results in savings for the organization.

However, production and engineering leaders focus on generating, modifying, and restructuring maintenance plans. Organizations consider the following questions: "Where to begin?" "Do we need to restructure the department of maintenance?" "Is it necessary to create management for this field?" "What kind of structure should we use?" and the like.

The objective of this chapter is focused on identifying three fundamental pillars for highly reliable systems: managing information, creating indicators, and restructuring preventative maintenance plans. These concepts aim to support production and maintenance managers in decision-making processes. They equally intend to support individuals and organizations seeking excellence in maintenance management practices in terms of facilitating decisions based on information with principles of excellence.

This chapter is organized as follows:

Section 2 provides a brief history of maintenance management and the definitions, related terms, and fundamental concepts.

Section 3 presents the proposed maintenance strategy model and the main results and analysis stemming from a study case. Lastly, conclusions are drawn in Section 4.
