In order to ensure that a manufacturing company is able to achieve the optimum productivity and equipment reliability, an effective maintenance system must be implemented. However it is very important to realize that the maintenance employee involvement is a critical factor in the maintenance implementation stage. An effective maintenance requires an understanding of the link between the maintenance and maintenance employee involvement. As such, there is a need for empirical research on the deployment strategy for the development of maintenance personnel incorporated within the company’s maintenance strategy. This study is a research programme based on the Irish and Malaysian automated manufacturing industries. The primary objective of this research is to formulate the maintenance strategy which leads to the deployment strategy for the development of maintenance personnel in Malaysian automated manufacturing companies. In order to achieve this primary objective, it is necessary to understand the current maintenance practice in manufacturing industries and to establish the extent to which Irish and also Malaysian companies invest in developing its maintenance teams through employee development. It involved carrying out a postal-survey questionnaire which examined and analyzed the maintenance implementation and the nature of problems and difficulties faced by the maintenance personnel in performing their tasks and activities. A comparative study has also been carried out between both countries, as well as the correlation between variables measured which relate to the performance of the company. The key findings are as follow: the commitment of top management plays very important role in the implementation of maintenance strategy; most of the problems encountered in maintaining the automated system are closely related to the human aspects, i.e. maintenance personnel; higher the utilization of proactive and aggressive maintenance, better the improvement of equipment availability that could be expected; by conducting an appropriate and good training implementation, a better improvement of equipment availability could be achieved; in Malaysia, there is higher improvement of equipment availability in the company which uses in-house maintenance. Based on the theoretical understanding of current research in the literature and the results of empirical data found in this study, the author proposes a deployment strategy for the development of maintenance personnel to be incorporated within the company’s maintenance strategy in Malaysia, from the maintenance employee perspective and participation for self reliance and improved reliability and performance.