Total Productive Maintenance (or TPM) is a comprehensive maintenance strategy designed to empower every level of your organization to become deeply involved in equipment maintenance. TPM is an essential part of Lean Manufacturing—the ultimate goal being to reduce downtime and inventory, while systematically improving productivity, cost-efficiency and increasing output—without expensive upgrades and capital investments. Systematically TPMempowers employees to make better maintenance decisions and acquire career building skill sets through training and comprehensive understanding of the machinery that they operate.
The main objective of TPM is to eliminate six major losses in production:
- Downtime losses
- Setup losses
- Speed losses
- Idle minor stoppages
- Quality losses
- Startup losses
Properly implementing such a program could mean the difference between shutting down production due to catastrophic failure, or merely delaying production because an onsite machine operator spotted a developing fault, and was able to repair it before it became a major issue. A large part of TPM is teaching machine operators every aspect of the machinery that they work with—so that they themselves can perform preventative maintenance, quality checks and modifications as required or to improve operational excellence—freeing up your skilled engineers for more advanced projects. In a manner of speaking,TPM is the ultimate insurance policy because it by definition reduces operational risks by ensuring that every aspect of the operational process is well understood by every level of the organization.
This program deploys eight major pillars site-wide to ensure operational excellence:
- Autonomous Maintenance
- Focus Improvement
- Planned Maintenance
- Technical Training
- Equipment Maintenance
- Quality Maintenance
- Administrative Management
- Environmental Health & Safety Management
Many companies struggle to implement TPM due to two main reasons. First is in understanding the linkages between the eight pillars and true operational excellence—many books on TPM will be long on theory and short on implementation details. The second is that TPM require more time, efforts and resources that many companies believe they can afford. This is due to amount of initial involvement and training required for true Autonomous Maintenance participation to bear fruit—where operators participate in the restoring of equipment to its original capacity, and then improve that equipment.
The rewards of a successful TPM deployment however, far outweigh the initial costs and efforts. This is because companies utilizing TPM find it so much easier to outperform the competitors who do not. The long-term savings acquired through TPM are unquestioned—because machinery is better utilized and lasts longer, with less downtime, faults and quality issues.
Here at SSCX we have developed through extensive trials and experience a comprehensive Total Productive Maintenance program, which we have successfully deployed in some of the largest companies in the Asia Pacific region with great results. These results are real, and provable. We thoroughly train operators to fully understand the machinery they work with, and ensure company-wide participation and implementation of the very best operational practices. These practices reduce waste and costs, and also increase efficiency and production capacity. In this way it is possible to achieve true operational excellence.
All the best manufacturing companies already successfully use TPM practices, so why not yours?
We offer free initial discussion, executive briefing, and free deployment planning for qualified companies. To learn more on this please drop us an email.