Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
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.
Defining Total Productive Maintenance
Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance strategy for achieving near-perfect production without breakdowns, item defects, unplanned stops, slowdowns, or safety incidents.
A total productive maintenance program improves productivity by focusing on 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, boost uptime, and extend asset lifecycles.TPM 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.
TPM Maintenance Definition and Your Teams
In a TPM program, every employee is responsible for and deeply familiar with the machines and equipment they work with. Maintenance is no longer the responsibility of a few people in the department; rather, the entire team performs preventive maintenance tasks.
Each plant worker or operator is responsible for effectively managing their equipment, and they receive the necessary training to complete maintenance tasks. Team members perform regular maintenance like lubrication, inspection, and minor repairs, ensuring the equipment is well-maintained. This frees up skilled maintenance staff to perform more in-depth repairs where needed.
With a TPM program, 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.
How Does Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) Work?
Total Productive Maintenance works by reframing the way everyone in your organization thinks about maintenance.
The secret to total productive maintenance is right there in the TPM definition: everyone in your organization needs to be involved in the maintenance process. In other words, every member of your operation plays a part in keeping your production equipment at peak performance levels.
In a TPM program, every plant employee receives enough training to perform simple repairs and handle basic machine upkeep. Machine operators, for example, can also clean and lubricate equipment. Everyone can carry out simple inspections.
This frees up skilled maintenance technicians, letting them focus on more pressing tasks instead of constantly addressing minor issues. It also means that everybody on the plant floor is looking out for potential asset faults, so you’re more likely to spot issues early on while they’re easily corrected.
Who Should Participate in Total Productive Maintenance?
Every team member should participate in total productive maintenance. TPM means breaking down the silos between maintenance and operations, so everyone on the plant floor is responsible for asset upkeep.
That doesn’t mean that everyone has to do exactly the same jobs. TPM maintenance gives each person a unique role. Upper management is responsible for driving and organizing the TPM program. Machine operators are responsible for cleaning and lubricating equipment. Maintenance technicians handle the more complex repair jobs and support operators as needed.
It’s also a good idea to use digital tools, like a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). TPM has a large preventive maintenance component, which requires planning and tracking; a CMMS can shine here. Your CMMS can help you create a solid preventive maintenance plan, assign PMs to the right employees, and track PM completion rates. CMMS software can also track asset metrics like Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and help you pinpoint areas that need improvement.
What are the 8 Pillars of TPM? Definitions and Examples
Eight types of maintenance are central to a complete and effective TPM strategy. These are known as the eight pillars of TPM.
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.
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.
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 Six Major Losses in Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)?
The TPM definition of loss refers to any factor that interferes with your plant’s productivity and efficiency. That includes wasted resources, slowdowns in the production line, and asset failures.
Achieving TPM means ensuring that all of your assets are operating at peak performance. As such, your team needs to prevent all possible losses to support your TPM program. The six “major,” or “big” losses are:
- Breakdowns
- Setup and adjustment
- Idling and stoppages
- Slowdowns
- Quality defects
- Startup and yield losses
It’s helpful to think about these losses as corresponding to the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) components: Availability, Performance, and Quality.
Breakdowns and Setup and Adjustment both correspond to availability. Frequent asset breakdowns, or lengthy adjustment and setup periods, will reduce availability and throw off your production schedule.
Idling, stoppages, and slowdowns all correspond to performance. Even if your assets remain operational, they are not producing as much as they could, so you likely won’t meet your production goals.
Quality defects and startup and yield losses correspond to quality: you may be successfully producing goods, but of a lower quality than your customers expect, potentially hurting your organization’s reputation.
Analyzing your losses in terms of these categories can help you target the areas that need improvement and prioritize the problems that matter most to you.
What Is the Difference Between Lean Manufacturing and TPM?
Lean manufacturing and TPM are both powerful methodologies, but they are different in focus and scope. While TPM programs focus on maintenance strategy, lean manufacturing centers on maximizing value for the customer or end user.
Lean manufacturing targets waste elimination across the entire value stream by looking at the supply chain, reducing overproduction, optimizing inventory, and reducing defects through strategies like just-in-time (JIT) and value stream mapping (VSM). It uses a method called kaizen, which drives continuous improvement through small, incremental changes with employee involvement at all levels.
TPM, however, focuses on equipment reliability, leveraging its eight pillars to minimize equipment breakdowns and optimize OEE.
While lean manufacturing is a broad philosophy for process optimization, TPM is a targeted program ensuring machinery supports lean manufacturing’s smooth workflows. The two are complementary: reliable equipment from TPM enables lean manufacturing’s waste-free flow.
TPM is often implemented as part of a lean manufacturing strategy. Both lean manufacturing and TPM involve improving processes with employees across departments in a strategy that ultimately improves processes for the entire organization. Combining lean manufacturing’s efficiency with TPM’s equipment focus can help companies achieve sustainable gains in quality and cost.
Benefits of Total Productive Maintenance
The TPM definition sets out clear goals: eliminating downtime and accidents. Even if you can’t meet those high standards, a good TPM maintenance program will definitely deliver benefits, starting at the production floor and moving 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 every company asset is operating at maximum capacity, producing the highest quality results. This ensures optimal production levels and top-quality products, ultimately improving the bottom line along with customer satisfaction.
2. Improved Equipment Availability
Involving employees in maintaining and taking responsibility for their own equipment means failures are caught sooner, ensuring increased asset availability and smoother functioning.
3. Safer Working Environment
TPM practices help ensure a safer working environment by encouraging employees to keep their stations clean and well-organized, making equipment issues easier to spot before they escalate into bigger, more dangerous problems.
4. Employee Growth
TPM maintenance practices grant employees more ownership and autonomy and help them become more well-rounded and better trained as they gain more knowledge about equipment. 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 consistently. 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 (OEE) 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 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 of 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. Implementing TPM involves carefully structuring your maintenance program to meet the goals set forth in the TPM definition. 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 is 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 to calculate 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 are often the biggest contributors 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 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.
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) in Manufacturing: Case Study
AAK is a global leader in the food and beverage industry. Based in Malmo, Sweden, the company has facilities worldwide. The AAK maintenance team uses eMaint CMMS to achieve Total Productive Maintenance, reducing losses and slashing its corrective maintenance time.
Before implementing eMaint, AAK’s maintenance team was stuck in reactive mode, constantly putting out fires. More than three-quarters of the team’s time was spent on corrective maintenance, which left little time for optimizing asset performance. That’s why they decided to switch to a Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) strategy.
The organization now uses eMaint CMMS to monitor asset performance and plan ahead for necessary maintenance work. eMaint enables easy preventive maintenance planning and tracking, helping organizations can stay ahead of equipment failure. Instead of putting out fires, AAK’s team can focus on eliminating slowdowns and preventing production defects.
The results have been dramatic. Thanks to TPM and CMMS, AAK has reduced the proportion of unplanned maintenance tasks from 78% to 9%. They’ve also sped up their response times, so that repairs happen quickly and don’t impact productivity. AAK is now on a clear path to continuous improvement and success, according to the TPM definition.
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 support the process by providing data and metrics and reducing manual data gathering while promoting 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. - Quality 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 asset failures to find a root cause. 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, ultimately improving 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 expire 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 over 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.