Company’s today aim towards increased performance and effectiveness in order to stay competitive. Being a part of such development programs, the maintenance function tries to be more precise in their doings and more cost-efficient in order to increase their value contribution. However, as a company only is one of many customers to the various suppliers of systems, machines and equipment being used, the maintenance function will remain a sub optimized small part of the various  product populations. The lack of information and knowledge from the complete product populations hampers development and makes all efforts to optimize maintenance in individual company organizations more or less meaningless. The key to improvement is the ongoing experience and the knowledge developed from use of a whole product population.

This paper describes how maintenance functions must develop using the knowledge acquired from an as complete product population as possible. The development achievable is described and exemplified and key actors are defined together with estimates of the economic potential that could be realized.