Reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) analysis of the cheese production line over a period of 17 months was investigated. The best fit of the failure and repair data between the common theoretical distributions was found and the respective parameters were computed. The reliability and hazard rate modes at the entire production line were calculated as well. The models are anticipated to be a useful tool to assess the current conditions, and to predict the reliability for upgrading the maintenance strategies of the production line. It was found out that (a) the availability of the cheese production line is 91.20% and went down to 87.03%. (b) the dominant four failure modes have the 62.2% of all the failures of the cheese production line, and (c) the average of a failure is every 12.5 operation hours and the mean time to repair is 66 min. This analysis will be very useful in terms of identifying both the occurring and latent problems in cheese manufacturing process of and, eventually, solve them. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.