Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance strategy for achieving near-perfect production with no breakdowns, item defects, unplanned stops, slowdowns, or safety incidents.
A total productive maintenance program improves productivity by focusing on both equipment and the people who use it. Rather than leaving maintenance to a specialized team, TPM distributes the responsibility of routine tasks like inspections, cleaning, and basic upkeep to plant workers and machine operators., This shared responsibility helps minimize defects, boosts uptime, and extends asset life cycles.
What is Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)?
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a proactive management philosophy that involves all employees in maintaining and improving equipment performance. Its goal is to eliminate defects, breakdowns, and accidents by focusing on preventive maintenance and continuous improvement.
TPM, which means total productive maintenance, is a comprehensive approach to maintenance that aims to maximize the effectiveness of production equipment. Instead of waiting until equipment breaks down to perform repairs, TPM emphasizes a proactive maintenance approach.
In TPM, every employee is responsible for and deeply familiar with the machines and equipment they work with. Maintenance is no longer the role of a few people in the department; rather, the entire team works to complete preventive maintenance tasks.
Each plant worker or operator is given the training and responsibility to effectively manage the equipment they use. Team members perform regular maintenance like lubrication, inspection, and minor repairs, ensuring the equipment is maintained well. This frees up skilled maintenance staff to perform more in-depth repairs where needed.
With a TPM strategy, every team member becomes thoroughly familiar with their machine and how it works. If a machine has a problem, the people who work with it daily are empowered to notice and take action. Either they will fix the problem themselves or notify the proper person so the issue can be addressed as quickly as possible.
Total productive maintenance succeeds when everyone is involved and committed, but it also depends on clear processes and shared standards across the organization.
What is 5S in Total Productive Maintenance?
5S is a systematic method used in Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) to organize and manage the workplace. It aims to create a clean, efficient, and safe environment by focusing on five key principles: Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain. These principles help improve productivity, reduce waste, and enhance overall operational efficiency.
1. Sort (Seiri):
- This step involves identifying and removing unnecessary items from the workplace. By sorting through tools, equipment, and materials, workers can eliminate clutter and free up space.
- Benefits: Reduces the risk of accidents, improves efficiency, and creates a more organized work area.
2. Set in Order (Seiton):
- Arrange necessary items in a logical order so they are easy to access and use. This involves labeling and organizing tools and materials in a way that minimizes wasted motion and time.
- Benefits: Enhances workflow efficiency, reduces time spent searching for items, and creates a more orderly environment.
3. Shine (Seiso):
- Clean the workplace and equipment regularly to maintain a tidy and hygienic environment. This step involves routine cleaning and inspection to ensure that everything is in good working condition.
- Benefits: Prevents equipment deterioration, identifies potential issues early, and promotes a sense of pride and ownership among workers.
4. Standardize (Seiketsu):
- Establish standardized procedures and practices for maintaining the first three steps. This involves creating schedules, checklists, and guidelines to ensure consistency and sustainability.
- Benefits: Ensures uniformity in workplace organization, reduces variability, and makes it easier to train new employees.
5. Sustain (Shitsuke):
- Maintain and continually improve the 5S practices by fostering a culture of discipline and continuous improvement. This step involves regular audits, feedback, and reinforcement of the 5S principles.
- Benefits: Encourages ongoing adherence to best practices, promotes continuous improvement, and helps sustain the gains achieved through the 5S process.
Incorporating 5S into Total Productive Maintenance helps create a well-organized, efficient, and safe workplace. By systematically implementing these principles, organizations can enhance productivity, reduce waste, and support a culture of continuous improvement.
What are the 8 Pillars of Total Productive Maintenance?
There are eight types of maintenance central to a complete and effective TPM strategy. These are known as the the eight pillars of TPM.
Here’s a description of each:
1. Autonomous Maintenance
Operators are given training on routine procedures from inspection to lubricating machines, ensuring they have full knowledge of the technical skills needed to work with equipment and troubleshoot emerging issues.
Example: Machine operators at a manufacturing plant are trained to perform daily cleaning, lubrication, and visual inspections on their machines. By doing so, they can quickly identify and report any unusual conditions, such as leaks or abnormal noises, to the maintenance team for further investigation and repair.
2. Quality Maintenance
A root cause analysis is conducted for quality assurance purposes to detect what causes quality defects. Design errors are caught at this stage, and measures are taken to prevent defects from moving downstream and racking up costs.
Example: A food processing company implements a stringent quality maintenance program where equipment is regularly inspected for cleanliness and proper functioning. This prevents contamination and ensures that all products meet the required health and safety standards, thereby reducing customer complaints and product recalls.
3. Planned Maintenance
Unlike other maintenance strategies, like Run to Failure (RTF) maintenance, a TPM strategy encourages preventive and proactive maintenance. These maintenance tasks can be scheduled when assets are idle, so rpoduction won’t be impacted as much.
Example: An automotive factory uses historical data to schedule regular maintenance activities for its assembly line robots. These activities include replacing worn-out parts and performing system diagnostics, which helps prevent unexpected breakdowns and keeps production running smoothly.
4. Focused Improvement
Smaller teams are asked to observe a specific process and plan ways to improve it. This cross-functional activity enables them to recognize persistent problems with the assembly or production line while analyzing the risks of each action.
Example: A packaging facility forms a cross-functional team to address frequent bottlenecks in their production line. Through root cause analysis and brainstorming sessions, they implement process changes that increase throughput by 15% and reduce downtime.
5. Early Equipment Management
This pillar employs manufacturing practices via TPM to perfect new equipment designs, allowing them to meet ideal performance levels faster. As a result, maintenance is easier to manage and new machines can be installed at a lower cost.
Example: During the design phase of a new bottling line, the engineering team collaborates with maintenance technicians to ensure easy access to critical components. This collaboration results in a layout that simplifies maintenance tasks and reduces the time needed for equipment servicing.
6. Training and Education
Operator and managerial training empowers personnel with a newfound knowledge of TPM and its techniques for preventive maintenance. Operators learn how to identify and manage problems as they develop. Employees may also receive coaching and career development on the side.
Example: A chemical plant invests in a comprehensive training program for its employees, covering safe handling of materials, equipment operation, and emergency procedures. Regular refresher courses ensure that staff remain knowledgeable and capable of maintaining high safety and operational standards.
7. Safety, Health, and Environment
These considerations are meant to eliminate the risks of physical harm, ensuring an accident-free workplace where equipment is calibrated and correctly set up to align with safety standards.
Example: A mining company implements rigorous safety checks and regular maintenance on its heavy machinery. By doing so, they prevent hazardous equipment failures, protect their workers from accidents, and minimize environmental impacts from potential spills or emissions.
8. TPM in Administration
This pillar seeks to reduce administrative waste in areas such as procurement, scheduling, and order approval by applying TPM principles to streamline tasks such as locating spare parts and delivering production materials.
Example: A manufacturing plant realized that delays in maintenance were often caused by a lack of readily available spare parts. Technicians spent too much time chasing down part numbers, waiting on procurement, or discovering that the wrong items had been ordered. To address this, the administrative and maintenance teams collaborated to create a standardized digital parts catalog linked to each machine and implement a reorder alert system for critical spares based on usage rates. This streamlined the parts reordering and ensured critical spares were always available and easy to locate.
TPM can be calculated from tangible maintenance key performance indicators (KPIs) such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). This measures the efficiency, availability, and quality of assets required for mass production. Any equipment performing under peak capacity, stopped in the middle of production, or producing lower-quality output will reduce the OEE score.
Benefits of Total Productive Maintenance
The benefits of total productive maintenance start at the production floor and move all the way to the administrative offices and the end users of your product.
1. Reduced Downtime
TPM reduces or even eliminates downtime by ensuring all assets are operating at their maximum capacity with the highest quality results. This ensures optimal production levels and high-quality products, ultimately improving the bottom line along with customer satisfaction.
2. Improved Equipment Availability
The practice of getting employees involved in maintaining and taking responsibility for their own equipment means failures are caught sooner, ensuring assets will be more available and function more smoothly.
3. Safer Working Environment
TPM practices help ensure a safer working environment by encouraging employees to keep their stations clean and well-organized, so that equipment issues are easy to spot before they escalate into bigger, more dangerous problems.
4. Employee Growth
TPM maintenance practices allow employees to have more ownership and autonomy and become more well-rounded and better trained as they gain more knowledge of the equipment they’re working with. It also encourages problem solving and creativity, as well as knowledge sharing and teamwork across departments.
5. Reduced Maintenance Costs
TPM encourages proactive, operator-led maintenance that catches small issues before they become expensive breakdowns. By reducing unplanned downtime and extending the time between major repairs, maintenance costs drop significantly over time.
6. Longer Equipment Lifespan
Through regular inspections, cleaning, and early problem detection, TPM helps keep equipment in optimal condition. This not only improves performance but also extends the useful life of machines by preventing wear and tear from going unnoticed.
7. Improved OEE Score
TPM boosts Overall Equipment Effectiveness by minimizing downtime, speeding up changeovers, and reducing defects. With operators and maintenance teams working together, equipment runs more reliably, producing more high-quality output in less time.
How a CMMS Enables a Total Productive Maintenance Strategy
TPM is accompanied by performance metrics that help manufacturers address different types of productivity loss. To better visualize OEE and its loss categories, maintenance teams can employ computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software to assist with the core functions of every TPM step. For instance, a CMMS provides automated work order creation and tracking, making it easier to visualize performance and make adjustments while saving significant manual effort.
A CMMS combined with condition monitoring sensors can also show where and when assets are demonstrating signs of wear so that the team can restore them to normal conditions before they fail, allowing companies to enable predictive maintenance. Managers can even assign training workshops to employees through their CMMS accounts, including resources offered by vendors. Additionally, a CMMS generates repair logs during early equipment management, which are critical for uncovering the symptoms of asset failure.
A CMMS can strengthen quality assurance by supporting manual spot checks, integrating with condition-monitoring sensors, and helping identify patterns of energy or material waste that may indicate quality issues.
It reminds technicians to complete tasks like quality testing the final product. A CMMS can print safety inspections and audit records for further review, including identifying potential hazards such as components stored in flammable areas. Users can quickly retrieve standard operating procedures, certifications, and other checklists for external agencies.
Businesses that depend on machines to keep industrial processes moving face higher downtime costs when equipment isn’t working correctly. Fortunately, a Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) program helps address this by focusing on proactive and preventive maintenance to keep systems running smoothly and minimize losses.
Learn more about how a CMMS enables TPM.
5 Steps to Get Started with a TPM Strategy
Once you have a good grasp of the 5S system, you are ready to implement a TPM program. This section will show you how in five steps:
1. Identify and Choose Equipment for the Pilot Area
In this step, you will be targeting equipment from among three distinct categories:
- Easiest to improve
- Constraint/bottleneck
- Most problematic
There are pros and cons to keep in mind when choosing a beginning project. Companies that lack total productive maintenance experience should choose a project from the easiest to improve category for quickest success. While these projects may not have the most impact on your organization, they will help you gain experience in developing and implementing a TPM strategy. These projects will also have a high likelihood of success.
The next tier is the constraint/bottleneck projects, which increase total output and provide ample payback. These issues are usually more difficult to solve, but will also provide greater benefits than those from the easiest to improve category.
Finally, the most problematic projects concern well-known problems in order to strengthen a TPM strategy. While these projects can be highly impactful if they are successful, they may be challenging to solve at all.
2. Restore Assets to Prime Operating Condition
Clean up the surrounding area and take photos of the equipment to document its initial state. This is the first step to launching an autonomous maintenance program to get operators and technicians on the same page about routine cleaning and repair procedures.
Next, identify and document wear points and critical inspection areas. Use transparent guarding where possible to make visual checks easier, and label settings to streamline future audits. Take note of all lubrication points during a changeover to ensure nothing gets missed. Once everything is clearly documented, train operators on the required tasks and provide a checklist to guide their daily, weekly, and monthly responsibilities.
3. Measure OEE Data to Understand Top Losses
Use smart sensors or connected devices to automatically capture the data needed for calculating Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). This includes availability, performance, and quality metrics. By automating these calculations, you reduce manual errors and get real-time visibility into equipment performance.
Pay close attention to unplanned stop time. These unexpected interruptions often contribute the most to lost productivity. Identify the most frequent or time-consuming stop events and rank them from greatest to least impact.
Track this data consistently for at least two weeks to get a clear picture of where your biggest losses are happening. This will help you measure the effectiveness of your TPM efforts and prioritize the issues that will deliver the most value when resolved.
4. Respond to Shifts in the Six Major Losses
The source of lost productive time can be drawn out by introducing a focused improvement approach. The six major losses fall into these categories:
- Equipment failure
- Setup and adjustment
- Idling or other minor stops
- Reduced speed
- Process defects
- Reduced yield
Address the biggest loss through root cause analysis and appoint a cross-functional team to observe the remaining issues. Collect physical evidence of the symptoms, then record them on an Ishikawa diagram . The Ishikawa diagram, also known as a fishbone diagram or cause-and-effect diagram, will help identify root causes and effects of the problem. The proposed fixes should be put into motion by scheduling planned downtime. After repairs, reset production to see how effective the procedures are.
5. Integrate Proactive Maintenance Techniques
Focus your proactive maintenance efforts on components that are prone to wear or failure. These may include bearings, belts, motors, or any parts subject to friction, heat, or repetitive motion. To identify potential failure points, consider running diagnostics like vibration analysis or thermal imaging to detect early signs of stress.
Once you’ve identified critical components, define maintenance intervals based on wear levels, predicted failure points, operating hours, or historical work order data. Set an initial baseline for each interval, then create a feedback loop using log sheets, condition monitoring data, and technician notes to fine-tune your schedule over time.
To keep the process effective, conduct monthly audits to verify the accuracy of maintenance records and ensure any new issues or observations are being properly logged and reviewed.
How to Achieve TPM with a CMMS
Achieving perfect TPM is a lofty goal that may never be entirely reached. However, adhering to the 5S principles and implementing the eight pillars of total productive maintenance puts organizations on the path to getting much closer to TPM.
TPM tools like eMaint CMMS can encourage the process by providing data and metrics and reducing manual data gathering while supporting maintenance improvements. Combining a CMMS with tools such as vibration and temperature monitors supports the TPM maintenance process and empowers employees with even more ways to identify and correct maintenance issues before they cause unplanned downtime.
Here’s how a CMMS can help with each of the 8 pillars:
- Autonomous Maintenance
A CMMS allows each task or work order to be categorized in many ways, including who it needs to be assigned to. Depending on the skill required to complete the job, it can be assigned accordingly in a CMMS, with less complex tasks assigned to operators while more complex tasks can be assigned to technicians with the correct training and experience levels. - Qualilty Maintenance
While a PM schedule is required to ensure that quality is maintained through routine manual inspections, it may not be enough as there is still room for human error. It must then be reinforced by a predictive maintenance strategy deployed within the CMMS. Real-time monitoring sensors can detect potential problems before they occur and trigger the intervention of a maintenance technician before a defect or breakdown occurs. - Planned Maintenance
By tracking trends, analyzing real-time asset data, and following manufacturer recommendations, organizations can prevent production waste, shorter equipment life cycles, increased equipment replacement and labor costs, and unplanned downtime. A CMMS enables users to plan, set up and track these jobs. - Focused Improvement
A CMMS provides the historical data required to analyze failures on assets to find root cause of the failure. This will enable the technicians to gather knowledge on how each machine tends to break down. This information also allows maintenance teams to make modifications to assets or processes to ultimately improve reliability. - Early Equipment Management
Having complete historical data of an asset stored and available in a CMMS facilitates this pillar of TPM. The company can review breakdown causes and repairs. Consistent problems will be highlighted, and more permanent fixes can be made, from using a redesigned asset or making a change in the process of the maintenance schedule. - Education and Training
A CMMS can track training or certifications that may be required to complete a job. Alerts and notifications can be set up to see when training may be expired or if it is a requirement to complete a task. - Safety, Health, and Environment
A CMMS allows companies to store information such as safety data sheets, standard operating procedures, and safety checklists. If required by auditors, the reporting feature in a CMMS will demonstrate that safety requirements have been followed. - TPM in Administration
A CMMS can help bridge the gap between maintenance and administration personnel. Both are required to run a successful manufacturing operation, but rarely work side-by-side. A CMMS can act as a single source of truth for both groups. It provides easy access to documentation such as photos and operating manuals, reducing time searching for these documents. Admin staff can also leverage inventory and spare parts tracking in a CMMS to ensure parts are available for maintenance teams.
Establishing clear goals and objectives while fostering a culture of continuous improvement will allow your organization to achieve key TPM milestones with time. As you continually work on your TPM strategy, you’ll get close to reaching the ultimate goal: no breakdowns, product defects, unplanned stops, slowdowns, or safety incidents.