Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
Total productive maintenance (TPM) is best described as a maintenance strategy for achieving near-perfect production. That means no breakdowns, item defects, unplanned stops, slowdowns, or safety incidents.
A total productive maintenance program applies both physical assets and labor toward improving productivity across the board by raising the effectiveness of employees, equipment, and supporting mechanisms. The responsibility is then distributed to plant workers and operators alike, as they are tasked with minimizing defects, boosting uptime, and evaluating asset life cycles.
What is Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)?
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a proactive management philosophy that integrates all organizational functions to enhance equipment reliability and workplace efficiency. Focused on preventive maintenance and continuous improvement, TPM aims to achieve zero defects, breakdowns, and accidents, optimizing production processes and ensuring sustainable operational success.
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 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 relies on buy-in from team members, but it also requires adherence to a set of standards.
The 5S Foundation of Total Productive Maintenance
TPM is a bottom-up approach, starting with the 5S foundation that encapsulates five ideals:
- Sort determines what is needed in the work area and eliminates what is not needed. This reduces clutter and removes distractions.
- Straighten organizes the work area after sorting. This includes arranging the remaining tools and implementing color coding or other strategies to make items easy to find and facilitate a smooth workflow.
- Shine cleans and inspects workspaces. The work area is regularly cleaned to remove dust and debris.
- Standardize documents the three previous 5S processes, creating things like standard operating procedures, checklists, and other visual aids to help maintain the previous steps.
- Sustain is the consistent application of the previous steps. It encourages employees to not only maintain the standards, but to continuously suggest improvements to the processes.
The 5S organization methodology helps teams create a clutter-free, organized, efficient environment. This makes it easier to spot and address potential equipment issues before they become major problems. It also becomes easier to find tools and parts when needed, which saves time.
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.
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.
3. Planned Maintenance
This is where downtime and failure rates are applied to maintenance tasks, scheduled around when assets are the least busy. Production won’t be impacted as much when maintenance can be performed during times the equipment is already idle.
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.
5. Early Equipment Management
This pillar employs manufacturing practices via TPM to perfect new equipment designs, allowing them to meet performance levels faster. As a result, maintenance is easier to manage and new machines can be installed at a lower cost.
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.
7. Safety, Health, and Environment
These considerations are meant to eliminate the risks of physical harm, which manifests in an accident-free workplace where equipment is calibrated and correctly set up to align with safety standards.
8. TPM in Administration
This pillar seeks to lessen administrative waste throughout procurement, scheduling, and order approval by exercising TPM in the manufacturing process to track down missing parts and drop off production materials.
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 or stopped in the middle of production, and any reduction in quality, will reduce the OEE score.
Benefits of Total Productive Maintenance
The goal of TPM is perfect production by eliminating machine breakdowns, defects, and accidents. 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.
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.
The practice of getting employees involved in maintaining and taking responsibility for their own equipment has multiple benefits. Of course, one benefit is that the assets themselves will be more available and function more smoothly. But beyond that, 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.
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.
Other important benefits include improved OEE score, reduced maintenance costs, and longer equipment lifespan.
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. 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.
Quality assurance is also strengthened by a CMMS since it detects energy and material waste through manual spot checks or mounting sensors used to monitor asset conditions. It reminds technicians to complete tasks like quality testing the final product. A CMMS is able to 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 are facing higher downtime costs whenever equipment ceases to operate. Fortunately, a total productive maintenance program can be introduced to remedy the situation through proactive and preventive maintenance while preserving the quality and integrity of those systems. To that end, TPM aims at mitigating losses from unplanned downtime and quantifying stop events, restoring equipment to its prime condition.
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.
Document the inspection points of wear parts and use transparent guarding as a visual aid. Be sure to label settings to make audits a smoother process. Take note of all lubrication points during a changeover. Then, you’re ready to provide operators with adequate training and provide them with a checklist of required tasks.
3. Measure OEE Data to Understand Top Losses
Automate OEE calculations with smart devices that automatically track key runtime metrics. Focus on understanding the reasons for unplanned stop time. Get to the bottom of where productive time is being wasted the most by unplanned stop events.
Then, rank them from most to least substantial. Collect data for at least two weeks to calculate the total lost time and confirm if your TPM program is working as intended.
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 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
The candidates for proactive maintenance include components that wear and those that fail. What kind of equipment is prone to failing? Consider running a vibration or thermography analysis to test the stress points. Define the maintenance intervals using the wear level, predicted failure, time, and work order. Decide on a baseline interval for each, then create a feedback loop to optimize records like log sheets and conditions. Conduct monthly audits to verify log sheets and review new entries.
How to Achieve TPM
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 new production changes. 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.
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.