Total Productive Maintenance: Meaning, Pillars, and Benefits

 

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

-Kurt Vonnegut

 

Workers in operations, maintenance, and reliability constantly aim for "perfect output." This is particularly challenging because even the best-planned facilities occasionally experience unforeseen issues; yet, comprehensive productive maintenance will bring a facility as close as it is able to to "perfect output."

 

TPM presented no downtime and no equipment failure, which results in only production and profit as business advantages. The 5S methodology, which supports facility procedure organization and standardization and has numerous advantages for both production and workplace quality, is also the foundation of TPM. In this blog, you will learn more about Total Productive Maintenance.

 

Also Read | What is Preventative Maintenance?

 

 

What is Total Productive Maintenance?

 

The goal of TPM (Total Productive Maintenance), a comprehensive approach to equipment maintenance, is to produce flawless production:

 

1. No breakdowns

 

2. No minor stops or sluggish running.

 

3. No Errors.

 

4. No accidents.

 

To increase the operating efficiency of equipment, TPM places a strong emphasis on proactive and preventative maintenance. Placing a significant emphasis on empowering workers to help maintain their equipment, blurs the line between the duties of production and maintenance.

 

The establishment of a TPM program fosters a culture of shared responsibility for equipment, which motivates plant floor employees to take part more actively. This has the potential to greatly increase productivity in the ideal setting (increasing up time, reducing cycle times, and eliminating defects).

 

Also Read | Interaction Analytics

 

Pillars of Total Productive Maintenance

 

The eight pillars of total productive maintenance put a special emphasis on preventative and proactive methods for enhancing equipment reliability.

 

---

Pillars of Total Productive Maintenance

---

 

1. Autonomous Maintenance

 

Having fully qualified personnel who are given entire responsibility for doing standard maintenance tasks like cleaning, lubricating, and inspecting is what autonomous maintenance entails. In addition to increasing their familiarity with the specific piece of equipment, this offers machine operators a sense of ownership over their tools. 

 

Additionally, it ensures that the equipment is always lubricated and clean, assists in identifying problems before they result in failures, and frees up maintenance personnel for more complex jobs.

 

In order to implement autonomous maintenance, the machine must be cleaned to a "baseline" quality that the operator must uphold. This includes educating the operator on the technical abilities necessary to carry out a regular check in accordance with the machine's handbook. 

 

Once trained, the operator creates a schedule for autonomous inspections on their own. By maintaining consistency, everyone follows the same rules and guidelines.

 

2. Focused improvement

 

The foundation of focused improvement is the Japanese word "kaizen," which means "improvement." Kaizen in manufacturing calls for constant process and function improvement. Focused improvement examines the procedure as a whole and generates suggestions for how to make it better. 

 

The key to TPM is getting small teams to adopt a proactive mindset where they collaborate to create frequent, small-step improvements to equipment operation processes. 

 

The discovery of recurring issues through cross-functional brainstorming is made possible by the diversity of the team members. It also incorporates feedback from other sections of the business so that teams can understand how processes influence various divisions.

 

The number of processes and product problems are also decreased through focused improvement, which also improves safety by assessing the risks associated with each individual operation. Focused improvement ensures that changes are standardized, making them repeatable and long-lasting.

 

3. Planned Maintenance

 

When performing planned maintenance, it is necessary to analyze metrics such as failure rates and historical downtime. Then, maintenance tasks are scheduled in accordance with these predicted or observed failure rates or downtime intervals. 

 

To put it another way, since each piece of equipment needs maintenance at a specific time, you can plan your maintenance tasks to coincide with periods when the machinery is not in use or operating at low capacity. This virtually eliminates the need to stop production.

 

Planned maintenance also enables inventory to be accumulated in preparation for planned maintenance. Having this inventory building guarantees that any production drop brought on by maintenance is minimized because you'll know when each piece of equipment is scheduled for repair activities.

 

By scheduling the majority of maintenance for periods when equipment is not slated for production, taking this proactive approach significantly lowers the amount of unplanned downtime. 

 

By enabling you to better manage parts that are prone to wear and failure, it also enables you to plan your inventory more carefully. Other advantages include increased uptime due to a progressive decline in breakdowns and a reduction in capital expenditures on equipment because it is being used to its full capacity.

 

4. Quality maintenance

 

When it comes to maintenance, all the planning and strategy in the world won't matter if the work is done poorly. The quality maintenance pillar's emphasis is on incorporating production-process design fault detection and prevention. 

 

In order to do this, it employs root cause analysis, notably the "5 Whys," to locate and get rid of persistent sources of faults. Processes become more dependable and produce items that meet requirements the first time by proactively identifying the cause of mistakes or flaws.

 

The ability to stop defective items from advancing further along the production line, where they could cause a lot of rework, is arguably the biggest advantage of quality maintenance. 

 

With targeted quality maintenance, quality problems are addressed and long-term solutions are implemented, minimizing or totally eliminating faults and the associated downtime.

 

5. Early equipment management

 

To improve the design of new equipment, the TPM pillar of early equipment management applies the practical expertise and comprehensive understanding of manufacturing equipment that it has gained via total productive maintenance. 

 

By incorporating feedback from the users of a piece of equipment into its design, manufacturers can enhance future designs' maintainability and functionality.

 

It's critical to address issues like cleaning and lubricating convenience, accessibility of parts, ergonomic placement of controls for the operator's comfort, how changeovers take place, and safety elements when talking about equipment design. 

 

By adopting this strategy, efficiency is increased even further because new equipment is more quickly able to attain the intended performance levels because it already satisfies the required specifications and has less startup concerns.

 

6. Training and Education

 

A TPM programme can fail due to a lack of equipment expertise. Operators, managers, and maintenance employees all benefit from training and education.

 

They are meant to fill in any knowledge gaps and make sure everyone is on the same page with the TPM process so that TPM goals may be met.  Operators learn up abilities to spot developing issues and perform preventive equipment maintenance here. 

 

Managers gain a solid understanding of TPM principles, staff development, and mentoring, while the maintenance crew learns how to implement a proactive and preventative maintenance schedule. Operator training can be aided by using resources like single-point lessons that are displayed on or close to the equipment.

 

7. Safety, health and environment

 

By keeping a workplace safe, staff members may carry out their duties without running any health risks. Although it's necessary to create a productive atmosphere, doing so shouldn't come at the expense of a worker's health and safety. To do this, the environment, safety, and health should always be taken into account while introducing any TPM process solutions.

 

Aside from the apparent advantages, staff members tend to have a more positive outlook on work because they aren't concerned about this important factor. Productivity may noticeably increase as a result. The early equipment management stage of the TPM process should place a strong emphasis on safety.

 

8. TPM in administration

 

The total quality of a TPM programme depends on each individual component. By identifying and removing wasteful practices in administrative tasks, total productive maintenance should extend beyond the factory floor. This entails enhancing order processing, purchasing, and scheduling in order to support production. 

 

Considering that administrative tasks are sometimes the initial step in the entire production process, it is critical that they be efficient and waste-free. For instance, if order-processing operations are improved, material will reach the plant floor more quickly and with fewer mistakes, perhaps saving downtime while missing components are located.

 

Also Read | Introduction to Workforce Analytics

 

Benefits of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)

 

One of the key benefits of putting a TPM programme into place is the shift from reactive to predictive maintenance. Reactive maintenance, or "firefighting," is expensive because you must pay for both the cost of unscheduled downtime and the repairs to the machinery. In this section, we'll look at some of the direct and indirect advantages of complete productive maintenance.

 

1. Direct Benefits

 

• OEE will rise as there will be less unscheduled downtime.

 

• Decreased customer complaints.

 

• Decreased workplace accidents.

 

• Cost savings during production.

 

• Product quality improvement.

 

2. Indirect Benefits

 

• An increase in staff confidence.

 

• Produces a tidy, organized workplace.

 

• Gaining a sense of ownership results in an improvement in employee attitudes.

 

• Measures to prevent pollution are taken.

 

• Sharing knowledge and expertise amongst departments.

 

Also Read | Predictive Maintenance: Advantages and Implementation

 

 

Sustaining Improvement Achieved with Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)

 

A comprehensive programme of productive maintenance can be implemented with comparatively quick success. The challenge is keeping that success going for a long time. The employees come first in this. 

 

Employee buy-in to the TPM programme, the enhanced future of the business, and the ability to see how this improved future benefits them can all contribute to a strong sense of unity. The established sense of teamwork among employees can be strengthened by rewarding accomplishments.

 

Having engaging, active leadership is another strategy to implement your TPM programme and produce sustained progress. This displays the significance of the programme not just through words but also through deeds. Engaging leadership regularly injects new life into the process and keeps workers from reverting to old behaviours.

 

Both the short- and long-term success of initiatives depend on engaging the workforce. The creation of a shared vision for the future "better" state of the business and the explanation of how it will benefit employees are effective methods for motivating employees. 

 

This will provide a broad-based, powerful drive to achieve. Recognizing and rewarding desired behaviour is another effective tactic. In the context of TPM, this could entail offering a revolving monthly trophy for the Best 5S Area or giving out gift cards each month for the Biggest Kaizen Improvement. 

 

Your TPM programme can adapt to shifting conditions with the support of continuous improvement, which also prevents the programme from growing stale and your staff from losing interest.

 

By giving the initiative momentum, early success contributes to long-term success. However, if a project is seen as having been tried and failed, it will be far more difficult to effectively implement that programme in the future.

 

By giving the initiative momentum, early success contributes to long-term success. Contrarily, it will be far more difficult to successfully implement a plan in the future if it is seen as having been attempted and failed.

 

One of senior management's main duties is to exercise active leadership (up to and including the Plant Manager). It involves consistently communicating the value of TPM activities through words and deeds. 

 

Employees' inherent desire to revert to outdated behavior patterns and working methods is fought by active leadership. It continuously injects fresh energy into the project, which over time is assimilated by workers into new, ingrained behaviors.

 

Utilizing continuous improvement methodologies, the initiative is being evolved to prevent staleness and staff complacency. Maintaining the initiative's novelty and intrigue is the aim. By continuously adjusting it to a changing environment, the project evolves to help ensure that it flourishes over the long term.