Running a manufacturing unit smoothly largely depends on the effectiveness of machines or equipment. After all, sudden breakdowns, servicing delays, slow functioning, and defects can cost you heavily. Fortunately, with total productive maintenance (TPM), you can boost the production process and better utilize your plant capacity and assets.
This maintenance management system focuses on the optimal functioning of machines to minimize breakdowns and related waste. It’s preventive, proactive, and empowers operators to maintain their own equipment.
Moreover, from shop floor workers to senior managers, TPM actively involves all employees in every department to maximize equipment availability and effectiveness.
Let’s explore TPM and its implementation in detail.
What Is Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)?
A holistic equipment maintenance approach, TPM contributes to lean manufacturing by making production as flawless as possible. Instead of a ‘fix when it breaks’ mindset, TPM revolves around preventive maintenance, aiming at:
- Zero breakdowns
- Zero defects
- Zero instances of slow running or small stops
- Zero accidents
In the process, total productive maintenance (TPM) strives to eliminate these losses:
- Unforeseen Breakdown
Unexpected repairs cause equipment downtime and the cost includes lost yield, spare parts, and labor charges.
- Setup and Adjustment
During operating condition-related changes, production opportunity is lost.
- Stoppage
It is challenging to manually record resultant downtime, which is usually frequent and short. Hence, efficiency reports don’t include these losses. Over time, stoppages can lead to significant downtime and lost yield.
- Speed
Productivity losses occur when equipment is stopped shortly or slowed down to avoid quality defects. Since the machine still runs, these losses are usually not recorded.
- Quality Defect
Poor equipment performance or malfunction leads to off-specification production or defects. The output is either scrapped or reworked.
- Equipment and Capital Investment
Equipment wear and tear reduce its durability and lifespan. Hence, capital is invested frequently for replacement.
What Total Productive Maintenance Ensures
As a maintenance management method, TPM makes sure your equipment operates at maximum efficiency with minimal delays, defects, or breakdowns.
Its key objective is to maximize the performance metric called OEE or Overall Equipment Effectiveness. This metric assesses the extent of effective usage of equipment by considering:
- Performance (no slow running or small stops)
- Quality (no defective or subpar products)
- Availability (no stops, like changeovers or breakdowns)
And by conducting root cause analysis of the losses discussed above, TPM helps you achieve consistent output and greater productivity.
TPM also ensures workplace safety by minimizing unexpected equipment failures and potential accidents. Preventive maintenance, regular inspections, and timely detection of problems help create a production environment that is organized, clean, and safe.
Besides OEE and safety, TPM ensures:
- Increased sense of ownership among employees
- Knowledge exchange and collaboration among departments
- Lower manufacturing costs
- Better quality products
- Fewer customer complaints about defects or delayed deliveries
Steps to Implement Total Productive Maintenance
Total productive maintenance (TPM) was developed with 5S methodology as the foundation and 8 other activities or pillars as support. Let’s understand the same before delving into TPM implementation.
The 5S foundation consists of:
- Sort: Getting rid of anything not really required in the work zone
- Set in order: Organizing the rest of the items
- Shine: Cleaning and inspecting the work area
- Standardize: Setting standards for the above three
- Sustain: Ensuring regular application of standards
And these 8 pillars work towards improving equipment reliability proactively:
- Autonomous Maintenance
Certain maintenance activities are delegated to operators. Post training on basic tasks, they are accountable for equipment lifespan, cleanliness, and reliability.
- Focused Improvement
Kaizen or focused improvement is about proactively fixing maintenance problems. Through permanent solutions, equipment reliability sees continuous improvement.
- Planned Maintenance
Activities related to preventive maintenance are conducted as scheduled to minimize breakdowns and downtime, lower maintenance expenses, and extend machine lifespan.
- Training
With on-the-job training, operators acquire essential maintenance skills (spotting failure patterns, handling basic repairs, etc.) to improve machine reliability.
- Safety, Health, and Environment
TPM promotes a safe work ecosystem, robust worker health practices, and responsible resource and waste management.
- Quality Maintenance
This ensures that machines function in a way that produces top-quality items. Otherwise, malfunctioning equipment can hamper product quality and result in expensive reworks and rejects.
- Early Equipment Maintenance
Through early failure detection, timely repairs and replacements, and other improvements, this pillar ensures your equipment is working properly.
- Administrative TPM
TPM, the Six Sigma maintenance methodology, makes administrative processes more efficient and removes redundant activities. It optimizes the management of human resources and minimizes errors.
Now, here are the TPM implementation steps:
- Identify Pilot Area
When picking equipment for this area, ask:
- Which equipment is the easiest to improve?
Focusing on such machines will help you attain positive and immediate results. However, it won’t test the TPM system rigorously.
- Where’s the bottleneck?
When you pick equipment based on where the production is faltering, there’s an instant spike in output.
- What’s creating the most problem?
Fixing machines that trouble operators the most will help you earn support for TPM implementation. However, payback won’t be immediate.
- Restore Equipment to the Best Operational State
Leverage the 5S methodology and autonomous maintenance to ensure that the equipment is constantly in its original condition:
- Photograph the equipment’s current state and surrounding area and post it on the project board.
- Eliminate debris, waste, and unused tools.
- Organize necessary tools with a shadow board.
- Clean the equipment and the area around it.
- Photograph improvements and post them on project board.
- To maintain process continuity, create a 5S work process that is standardized.
- Audit the process to make sure 5S is being followed.
Next, create an autonomous maintenance program for standardizing equipment cleaning, inspection, and lubrication. And train operators before implementing the program.
- Identify and document points of inspection, including wear-prone parts.
- Where possible, improve visibility to inspect the machine while it’s running.
- Identify and label set points with settings that correspond with them.
- During planned downtime or changeovers, identify points of lubrication and schedule maintenance.
- Train operators to spot and report potential or emerging issues.
- For tasks controlled by operators, craft an autonomous maintenance checklist.
- Ensure checklist compliance through audits.
- Measure OEE
For the target equipment, track OEE, ideally with an automated software solution. Measuring OEE regularly helps you confirm the TPM program’s effectiveness and monitor its progress in a data-driven manner.
Also categorize every event of unplanned stoppage, since these lead to the biggest equipment losses. This way, you can precisely spot where a stoppage is happening. Ideally, for at least two weeks, collate data to get a clear picture of how production is affected by slow cycles and small stops.
- Deal with Major Losses
This step in total productive maintenance (TPM) implementation revolves around kaizen. So, bring together supervisors, operators, and maintenance personnel who can use root cause analysis to analyze OEE data. This will help in identifying the key causes behind major losses.
- Based on stoppage time data and OEE, pick a loss (ideally unplanned stoppage time’s biggest source).
- Study the problem’s symptoms and collate physical and photographic evidence and observations.
- Discuss with your team and zero in on the problem’s potential causes. Check them against the evidence collected and devise effective solutions.
- For implementing fixes, schedule planned downtime.
- Restart production and track the fix’s effectiveness over time. If the issue is resolved, note that you have to implement the change and focus on the next stoppage time cause. Else, collect more information and brainstorm further to solve the current problem.
- Implement Planned Maintenance
Based on failure-prone components, wear components, and stress points, decide which components need proactive maintenance. To identify stress points, use vibration analysis or infrared thermography. Next:
- Use intervals for proactive maintenance and update as required.
- For components prone to wear and failure, establish the wear level at present as well as a baseline replacement interval.
- For the above components, create a schedule of proactive replacement. Instead of calendar time, use run time.
- To create work orders depending on the schedule, put together a standardized process.
- Design a feedback system for optimizing maintenance intervals. For components prone to failure and wear, use log sheets where operators can record component condition and replacement information.
- Conduct audits every month to ensure the schedule is being followed and component logs are updated.
- Review information in the logs to decide if the schedule needs adjustments.
- Remember a Few Other Things
Besides following the 5 steps above:
- Introduce quality maintenance in the total productive maintenance (TPM) process when employees or customers raise major issues with quality.
- Use early equipment management while designing or installing new equipment.
- Use safety, health, and environment in all processes and programs.
- Before implementing the planned maintenance schedule’s final version, use administrative TPM to address part procurement, work order delays, etc.
Building a Culture of Reliability with TPM
Understanding and implementing total productive maintenance (TPM) enables every employee to take accountability for the health and performance of equipment. Operators, supervisors, and senior executives come together to transition from reactive to proactive problem-solving and care, which fosters a culture of top-to-bottom reliability.
And with fabriq’s digital, customizable dashboards, implementing TPM, tracking its progress, and ensuring continuous improvement is a breeze. From gaining complete visibility into machine condition and addressing major losses to making data-powered decisions, maintaining safety, and perfecting production, you can do it all.
Learn how you can embrace TPM with fabriq today.
