The major TPM improvement activities include maximizing equipment effectiveness, eliminating the six big equipment-related losses, autonomous maintenance by operators and small group activities, training to improve operation and maintenance skills and the promotion of maintainability from the design throughout the entire life span of the equipment. Even though, some companies are achieving remarkable success with Total Productive Maintenance: equipment downtimes are drastically reduced, equipment productivity is strongly increased, maintenance costs are reduced, process yields and product quality dramatically improved, when the enterprise focuses on maintenance efficiency, what will be the best strategy to achieve this target?

This work comes under the general problem of managing the performance of the maintenance function. It provides a summary of studies and approaches to this issue. Moreover, it proposes an original approach based on a decision support tool to define an evaluation of the performance of this function system activities. Multicriteria method is used to provide decision making. the Criteria, that integrate technical, financial, strategic and environment issues, are defined to select the best strategy of maintenance by homemade or outsourcing.

This will be illustrated by an application on a Moroccan manufacturing company. The proposed tool allows studying maintenance activities’ competitiveness and decision making.