Total Productive Maintenance is a management practice that takes into account all aspects of equipment maintenance, people behavior, and the production process, to achieve and maintain maximum efficiency of equipment and operations.
The origins of TPM?
The TPM concept was introduced by automotive component manufacturer Nippon Denso (now “Denso”), the second largest member of the Toyota Group. In the 1960s, they were the first to apply preventative maintenance, an effort to regularly maintain machines by skilled workers. But as they watched the growth of automation in their plants, they recognized the need to approach maintenance in a more sustainable way. Therefore, Nippon Denso dedicated itself to training machine operators to perform maintenance themselves (autonomous maintenance), reducing costs and minimizing downtime.
Thus, together with the introduction of preventive maintenance – working on the prevention of machine errors – Nippon Denso has created productive maintenance, later renamed TPM, focused on the joint work of all employees for the maintenance of machines and the maintaining high-quality production. A metric that is often applied as part of Total Productive Maintenance is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). It helps to analyze the true productivity of the machines that operate in a process.
How to apply Total Productive Maintenance?
TPM is based on the fundamentals of the 5S of Lean – a systematic effort to improve production through the following 5 actions, ensuring optimal working conditions for both equipment and machinery:
Separate the Unnecessary: remove unnecessary equipment from workstations,
Locate the Unnecessary: clearly organize the remaining equipment,
Remove Dirt: clean workspaces to ensure safety and efficiency,
Flag Anomalies: make the above efforts basic team policy,
Continue to Improve: maintain all established guidelines.
As an extension of these fundamental 5S principles, Total Productive Maintenance focuses on the following areas of maintenance:
Step 1: Autonomous Maintenance
Autonomous maintenance means that operating personnel is empowered to carry out basic maintenance on machinery, correct minor problems, and alert specialized teams to problems that are outside their purview. In the process, operators are more attentive to the needs and health of their workplace, become more aware of their impact on the process, and are better able to anticipate major problems, as well as suggest improvements.
Step 2: Planned maintenance
As the previous point suggests, not all maintenance can be carried out by the operators themselves. Both specialized maintenance and actions that operators can perform themselves can be planned in advance to minimize unplanned downtime. By looking at failure rates and past machine shutdowns, you can plan maintenance activities exactly when they are most likely to be needed. By knowing the scheduled downtime of each station, you will also be able to produce the necessary inventory for the process in advance and avoid maintenance affecting the entire production line. It covers all important assets even the small ones like GK420d-ug-en.
Step 3: Kaizen – focused improvement
The idea of Kaizen is to adjust and improve the process at every opportunity, every time. Instead of sitting down once every few months to see what can be done better, guide the team to spot small areas of improvement for themselves, and work together to introduce changes, then.
Focused improvement works best when your work groups include members of multiple functional teams. The different perspectives and knowledge of these workers help create continuous improvement processes that respond to the needs of all. Allowing workers to make improvements themselves empowers workers, eliminates rework problems, increases productivity, and reduces waste and defects.
Step 4: Quality Maintenance
Maintaining the quality of goods produced with TPM goes beyond ensuring the quality of the final product. Quality maintenance should help you to ensure that the quality achieved is the result of ideal machine conditions, established to avoid defects and to incorporate quality, by default. Keeping an eye on the health of your machines will allow you to constantly anticipate problems and fix them as soon as they occur.
Step 5: Management of new equipment
All the information and insights gained from machine maintenance and error checking that TPM entails are applied to the process of designing new equipment. This means that by the time a new machine arrives on your production floor, it is already tailored to your needs and prepared for common defect detection, as well as your regular maintenance schedule and practices.
Step 6: Training
This aspect of Total Productive Maintenance is to ensure that workers at all levels have the necessary information and knowledge to carry out TPM. Equipment operators must know how to operate and maintain their stations, specialized maintenance team members need a deep knowledge set to repair machines, and managers must be able to communicate effectively with train, and discipline other groups.
Step 7: TPM in the office
Since no production process exists in a vacuum but is accompanied by back-office functions such as material ordering, logistics, and large-scale workflow planning, your production maintenance cannot end on the shop floor. Office TPM means working to reduce waste in bureaucratic activities, streamlining processes adjacent to production, and fostering transparency and process improvements across all departments.
Step 8: Safety, health, and environment
As an indivisible part of the continuous flow of production, TPM works to ensure that the plant and offices are kept safe and free from accidents. Total Productive Maintenance incorporates the minimization of health and safety risks in daily and standardized operations. Happy, well-cared workers are not only the pride of your company, but they are also a crucial part of keeping defects low and product creation rates high.
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