What is Total Productive Maintenance?
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a holistic asset maintenance strategy that actively involves everyone in the facility – not just the maintenance team – to maximize overall equipment effectiveness, avoid breakdowns, and ensure safe, accident-free operations.
Because maintenance teams can’t be in all places at once, with TPM it becomes part of everyone’s job to flag the small fixes and improvements needed to ensure smooth, incident-free operations day in and day out. Total Productive Maintenance incorporates maintenance into day-to-day operations, leveraging the skills of all employees on site from top level management to machine operators.
How are Employees Involved in Total Productive Maintenance?
With TPM, maintenance is a shared responsibility across your entire workforce; however, the level and type of involvement varies by role. For example, managers are primarily responsible for evangelizing TPM as a corporate policy. Meanwhile, reliability engineers are tasked with analyzing maintenance data and sharing metrics and insights for continuous improvement. Furthermore, maintenance, operations, and test personnel take ownership of day-to-day tasks, which can range from cleaning the machine to reporting any signs of wear, non-destructive testing (NDT) and inspection, and providing feedback on how operation could be improved.
What is the Objective of Total Productive Maintenance?
With TPM, your entire team is working together towards the same goal that boils down to one word: zero. That is, zero waste, zero defects, zero breakdowns, and zero accidents.
Advantages of Total Productive Maintenance
1. Maximize Productivity
A holistic maintenance approach ensures that your equipment receives the care and attention needed to avoid resorting to breakdown maintenance and extend the life of the machine. When everyone is involved in your maintenance program, problems can be identified and remedied quickly, protecting the equipment from damage and reducing the risk of unplanned repairs. By limiting unexpected downtime, TPM increases machine availability, which is a key component of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) metrics.
2. Improve Safety
TPM requires that facilities are organized and cleaned systematically, enabling you to more easily uncover problems, streamline workflows, and identify and mitigate hazards. Furthermore, with fewer unexpected breakdowns, you reduce the risk of potentially dangerous mistakes that are more likely to be made when rushing to fix urgent issues. Ultimately, implementing a TPM strategy leads to fewer accidents and reduced safety risks.
3. Ensure Quality
When assets break down and production must regularly stop and restart for unexpected repairs, product quality will often suffer. In addition, slowed or stopped production can lead to shipping and delivery delays that reduce customer satisfaction and erode their loyalty. TPM helps you maintain production consistency and deliver high quality products at speed and at scale.
4. Save Costs
Cost savings come in many forms with TPM. By reducing the risk of unplanned shutdowns, TPM can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost production time. In addition, by repairing small problems as they arise, TPM can save maintenance and material costs by resolving issues before equipment damage or production flaws can occur.
What are the Pillars of Total Productive Maintenance?
Total Productive Maintenance is built on 8 pillars, outlined briefly below:
1. Autonomous Maintenance
Also known as Jishu Hozen, autonomous maintenance refers to “the restoration and prevention of accelerated deterioration.” This means that maintenance occurs automatically as part of an operator’s normal everyday activities. For example, machine operators incorporate care into their daily schedule, cleaning and lubricating the equipment daily while also checking for abnormalities and signs of wear.
2. Planned Maintenance
Planned maintenance means establishing preventive maintenance cadences based on key metrics, such as time-based triggers. By planning ahead for maintenance activities, issues that arise can be addressed during planned downtime, reducing the need for unexpected shutdowns for repairs. Unlike other maintenance strategies, like Run to Failure (RTF) maintenance, a TPM strategy encourages preventive and proactive maintenance.
3. Quality Integration
Key to optimizing overall effectiveness, quality control measures are incorporated into the production process. By identifying and resolving the cause of product defects, TPM helps prevent production flaws, minimize material waste and lost production time due to bad batches, and ensure customer satisfaction.
4. Focused Improvement
Focused improvement refers to designating cross-functional teams to problem-solve production issues that arise. TPM emphasizes incorporating diverse perspectives throughout the team to arrive at the optimal solution to each challenge.
5. New Equipment Management
This pillar refers to the optimization of new equipment management thanks to the collective knowledge that is built up with TPM. New equipment can achieve higher levels of performance with fewer issues thanks to the shared, cross-functional understanding of the equipment.
6. Training and education
Ensuring everyone has the training, education, and support necessary is key to the success of any TPM strategy. Workers, many of whom may not have been involved in maintenance previously, will need to acquire new skills to carry out TPM in their daily workflows. Furthermore, everyone must understand the value of TPM, as well as the importance of their own contributions to the larger objectives.
7. Safety, health, and environment
The objective of this pillar is creating a safe, accident-free environment for all workers. This pillar focuses on putting in place health and safety policies and procedures, while identifying and removing potentially hazardous conditions from the workplace.
8. TPM in administration
Finally, TPM includes everyone, not just those on the factory floor. Even administrative and support roles can and should be included in your TPM strategy and embrace TPM principles in their own work to realize the full advantages.