System reliability assessment serves as one of the decision tools in selecting the right maintenance strategy. However, scarcity of failure data which is the prerequisite of traditional reliability analysis, proved to be a formidable challenge in getting an accurate assessment. This study presents an alternative method of assessing repairable system reliability by utilizing the abundantly available system performance data. The proposed method is presented using an actual case study and validated based on actual failure data. The results proved the applicability of the proposed method based on statistically similar results to the actual failure data. © 2012 Asian Network for Scientific Information.