This paper presents a detailed study about reliability and maintenance issues associated with aluminium wire rolling mill plant. Comprehensive failure data for a period of year are collected and presented for understanding the failure pattern of components of rolling mill. Moreover, criticality analysis based on downtime, frequency of failures, loss of production volume and cost has been presented. The suggested study is carried out to determine the critical components for further analysis. The

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... primary findings of the paper is that concluded that bearings, gears and shafts (primary & secondary) are most critical components, which needs special attention in terms of reliability and maintenance to upgrade the working condition of overall process industry. The outcome of study will be helpful to understand the working lives of components and associated failures. It also help in deriving optimized maintenance plan to maximize the performance of process industry. 1. INTRODUCTION After globalization, various process industries all over the world face both global and local competition in order to improve the quality of product with keeping the sub system and machines in efficient working condition for carrying out its designated functions effectively for a sufficient possible longer time with high reliability. Minimum downtime of machine and reduction in penalty cost are the pressing needs of large complex process industries such as rolling mill, dairy plant, chemical-petrochemical plant, sugar mill, textile mill, paper industry and fertilizer plants etc. The working conditions and the repair strategies of process industries play an important role in maintaining the operating systems with maximum uptime. This can be achieved only through performance evaluation and analysis of critical components of the process industry. The reliability analysis issues were discussed almost half century back.These issues are considered as useful in the field of reliability modeling, risk analysis and maintenance planning. Barlow and Proshan [1-2] researchedsome practices in maintenance activities. Dekker [3], Pham and Wang [4], and Jensen [5] discussed classification of maintenance models. Sikorska J [6]presented scope to improve the quality of failure histories stored in computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS)