Total Productive Maintenance

What is Total Productive Maintenance?

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a shared-responsibility approach to maintenance that promotes the full participation of top-level management, operators, maintenance team, engineers, and everyone, in asset maintenance.

The goal of Total Productive Maintenance is maximizing the operational efficiency of assets to achieve perfect production:

  • No abrupt equipment stops or slowing down
  • Zero asset defects and breakdowns
  • 100% safety

Total Productive Maintenance focuses on proactive and preventive maintenance through collective participation. Through collective participation, Total Productive Maintenance can blur the lines of distinction between production and maintenance to make it possible for operators to maintain their equipment.

Getting Started With Total Productive Maintenance

The typical Total Productive Maintenance approach relies on the 5S (Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain) foundation and eight supporting activities described as pillars. Your Total Productive Maintenance program begins by establishing the 5S foundation and developing a maintenance strategy around the eight activities.

The 5S Foundation of Total Productive Maintenance

Sort: this is about keeping the essential equipment of production in the work area and eliminating equipment that is not used frequently in the work area.
Systemize: systemize by organizing items in the work area to be stored in one location, and one location only.
Shine: to ease fault identification and maintenance, shine represents the need to clean, inspect and keep work area clean.
Standardize: create standard processes for all operations where there was none.
Sustain: the continuous performance of all TPM actions.

When the 5S foundation is in full operation, you have a neat and well-organized work environment, where tools and parts are easy to find, faults like fluid leaks, material spills, hairline cracks in mechanisms and so on, are easier to spot.

The Eight Pillars of Total Productive Maintenance

Autonomous maintenance
Involves assigning basic maintenance routines such as equipment inspection, lubrication, and cleaning to operators. It motivates operators to know and own their equipment and use it optimally.

Autonomous maintenance also allows operators to identify new issues before they become failures, keep machines lubricated, and frees up work hours for maintenance personnel to perform higher-level tasks.

Planned Maintenance
TPM requires scheduled equipment maintenance tasks based on predictive maintenance data, failure modes, and triggers. This process reduces instances of stop time, enables scheduling of maintenance to coincide with production downtime, and cuts back inventory spend through efficient management of wear-prone and failure-prone parts.

Quality maintenance
Offers you the flexibility to include fault detection and prevention into production processes by applying root cause analysis to reduce recurring defects and cuts cost by identifying defects early as opposed to through inspection.

Focused improvement
Requires a team working together to proactively and consistently improve asset operations by identifying recurring problems and fixing them. The outcome is a culture of continuous improvement of machines and people.

Early equipment management
TPM helps to improve the design of new equipment through early equipment management which provides the needed know-how and understanding of manufacturing assets. The outcome is that new assets are built to meet performance levels faster, reduce startup issues, make maintenance simpler and holistic.

Training and education
Total Productive Maintenance is an ongoing strategy that requires learning and relearning to close knowledge gaps in pursuit of Total Productive Maintenance goals. Managers, maintenance teams, and operators need training and education.

In time, operators learn skills to operate equipment efficiently and perform routine maintenance error-free; while maintenance staff expands their knowledge of proactive and preventive maintenance. Managers learn TPM principles and how to apply them, as well as train to become the resource people for employee coaching and development.

Safety, health, environment
Ensure a safe and healthy working environment at all times to decrease the chances of exposure to health and safety risks to achieve an accident-free workplace.

TPM in Administration
Traditional TPM activities also involve applying TPM principles to administrative functions to cut administrative waste. TPM in administration improves overall organizational performance by enabling highly productive administration operations.

Measuring TPM in your company​

One of the most important KPI of TPM is the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), a metric that shows the level of productivity and progress in pursuit of perfect production regarding no stops, zero breakdowns, and no defects.

OEE measures the availability loss, performance loss, and quality loss during planned production, resulting in a measure of genuinely productive manufacturing time.

Availability loss records all activities that stop planned production long than permissible. For example a switch of equipment that takes longer than say, five minutes. The goal of the availability loss is to ensure no unplanned equipment stops, and breakdowns.

Performance loss measures all the factors that slow down production or cause small stops of equipment.

Quality loss accounts for substandard equipment, tools, parts to ensure no asset defects.

Generally, an OEE score of 100% is perfect production, 85% is world class for discrete manufacturers, 60% is relatively typical for discrete manufacturers, and 40% is not uncommon for manufacturers without TPM programs.

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