At today's manufacturers, reactive maintenance mostly takes place instead of prevention. At the same time, maintenance is seen as a necessary evil and many companies have no direct strategies or goals for maintenance. In today's maintenance, Industry 4.0 with digitalisation has begun research in and new methods and ideas are produced for more efficient maintenance. The purpose of this study is: To increase the knowledge of how manufacturers can understand and develop a strategy to achieve preventive maintenance and at the same time find essential elements for maintenance digitalisation.

Through a literature study, the existing research in prevention and digitalisation in maintenance was studied. To supplement, a single-case study was also conducted that included interviews from a manufacturing company that has reactive maintenance. Two focus groups were also conducted, one on the case company but also on another manufacturing company to compare the answers to the theory.

The study shows that there are several root causes that cause manufacturers to remain in reactive efforts in maintenance and it can be difficult to get out. This creates expensive costs for the manufacturer and stress for the maintenance operators. To get out and move towards more prevention, it is important to start with the basics, which is to have a strategy that has been jointly agreed within the organisation. Therefore, it is also important with training and choosing the right kind of maintenance depending on the machine and complexity. The last research question is more complex and it turned out that there are factors in digitalisation where manufacturing companies with reactive maintenance develop and use.

By understanding the causes and seeing elements to deal with preventive maintenance, manufacturers can practically use the study to achieve their maintenance goals. Regarding digitization, it is a step further and try to see if it is practical to implement at a company with reactive maintenance.

The study only covered information about a specific machine that is the base for generalisation within the case company factory plant. At the same time, the study focused only on the step between reactive and preventive maintenance in order to delimit the theoretical part.