During the last decades, maintenance has changed from an ordinary repair activity to a complex function that plays an essential role contributing for the company's results. The increasing level of complexity of modern equipment motivates maintenance personnel to improve both techniques, and management systems, in order to face the new challenges. Managing properly those modern means of production requires knowledge of methods and planning systems, controlling and performing maintenance tasks, in such a way that two objectives are achieved at the same time: system efficiency and cost-effectiveness. This paper shows CVRD's experience on evolving and implementing a model to plan and manage maintenance activities in order to achieve a higher level of performance on its operations.