Imagine a manufacturing plant where machines run like clockwork, ensuring a steady flow of high-quality products without unexpected downtimes. This seamless operation is the promise of total productive maintenance (TPM). By understanding and implementing TPM, you can enhance efficiency and reliability in your manufacturing processes.
For example, a factory might often face sudden machine failures, causing production delays and increased costs. By adopting TPM, the factory can systematically tackle these issues. Operators are involved in maintenance tasks, and data-driven strategies help predict and prevent breakdowns. This not only ramps up productivity but also boosts employee morale and safety.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the principles, implementation steps, and benefits of TPM to help you transform your maintenance processes.
What is total productive maintenance?
Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a comprehensive approach to equipment maintenance designed to maximize the productivity of manufacturing equipment by minimizing downtime, defects, and accidents. Originating in Japan in the 1960s, TPM seamlessly integrates maintenance into the daily operations of a manufacturing plant, involving all employees from operators to managers in the maintenance process.
At its core, TPM focuses on proactive and preventive maintenance to ensure that machines run at peak efficiency. It employs a set of structured activities and principles aimed at improving equipment reliability and performance. The ultimate goal of TPM is to create a production environment where machines are consistently available, defects are minimized, and safety is prioritized, leading to higher productivity and reduced operational costs.
To support these, TPM follows the 5S methodology, which was also developed in Japan around the 1960s. The 5S are:
- Seiri (sorting): aims to remove anything unnecessary in the work area.
- Seiton (systematizing): organizes the items to maintain clean locations for materials, tools, and machines.
- Seiso (cleaning): implements regular cleaning practices by dividing the floor into several areas and assigning teams to clean their assigned areas.
- Seiketsu (standardizing): creates standards for performing the first three tasks.
- Shitsuke (self-discipline): aims to make the system sustainable and ensures that all standards are applied regularly.
The 8 pillars of total productive maintenance
The eight pillars of TPM focus on preventive and proactive procedures to improve equipment reliability. TPM strives for perfect production, which translates to:
- No breakdowns
- No slow runs
- No defects
- No accidents
In order to achieve these goals, it is important to base your production cycle on a solid base of structured tasks and principles that are outlined in the following 8 axioms:
Autonomous maintenance
Operators are responsible for the maintenance and adjustments of machines assigned to them. This will result in more skilled and motivated employees who also understand the objectives of a lean organization.
Focused improvement
Improvement, or kaizen in Japanese, identifies and improves goals and brings about change. It ensures that teams from different departments work together to clearly identify problems and apply solutions that continuously improve the processes.
Planned maintenance
Planned maintenance consists of preventive and predictive maintenance using the data gleaned from monitoring machine behavior and maintenance history. Scheduled maintenance anticipates major breakdowns and as a result, production activities increase while unplanned downtimes decrease consequently.
Quality maintenance
By performing quality maintenance you ensure that the equipment can detect and prevent errors during production. It uses lean tools that “teach” machines to detect and report abnormal conditions. It ideally results in the total elimination of the root cause of defects.
Early equipment management
Focus on machine design that allows you and your operators to properly handle and maintain the equipment. This includes easy cleaning, inspection and lubrication, machine part accessibility, and ergonomics. The goal is to bring machine performance levels to a faster speed.
Training and education
The training and education pillar focuses on the improvement and enhancement of employees’ skills. In a way, both people and the machine they operate grow together and improve their relationship over time, resulting in higher productivity and fewer errors.
Safety, health, and environment
This pillar in the TPM checklist focuses on improving the working conditions of employees by removing potential health and safety hazards. To ensure this, you could perform a safety audit, for example.
The office TPM
The final pillar stresses the importance of using the principles of total productive maintenance in the administration. Its goal is to improve administrative operations, such as scheduling and procurement so that this positively influences the rest of the production process.
How to implement total maintenance in 5 steps
The implementation of total productive maintenance principles will optimize work schedules, produce efficient employees, create a cleaner and safer work environment, achieve equipment reliability, and save you money. It is a program that is designed for a holistic approach to productivity by paying attention to all of the branches influencing a production cycle, including management and administration down to the very basic principles of health and safety of employees.
Here’s how to implement these principles in the workplace:
1. Identify a pilot area
Choose an area where you can start applying TPM principles first. Once employees see the benefits of the process, they will be more accepting of the new style of process. Include employees from different departments during the pilot process and create a project board so they can visualize where they’re going.
When looking for a pilot area, you should ask these three questions:
- Which equipment is the easiest to improve? By choosing the easiest equipment to improve, you will most likely get positive results that motivate you to continue the TPM program.
- What are the bottleneck areas? Choose a machine that slows down the production process. Once you solve this, your total output will increase.
- Which area is the most problematic one? If you are able to fix a machine that gives operators a lot of headaches you encourage them to adopt TPM processes in the workplace as a good solution to problems of this kind.
2. Restore equipment to its optimum condition
The concept of this principle focuses on the 5s system and autonomous maintenance. Operators should first learn how to consistently keep the machine in its optimum condition using the 5s program: by being organized, clean, orderly, using standardized and sustainable methods.
3. Measure overall equipment effectiveness
This step requires tracking the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of the target machine. Monitoring and measuring OEE provides a data-driven confirmation of whether your TPM program is effective or not. More so, it tracks your overall program as well and gives you a general idea of your efficiency.
4. Reduce major losses
After you have a data-driven overview of where your top bottlenecks and losses are, address them immediately. Start by organizing a cross-functional team of operators, supervisors, and maintenance personnel to delve into the OEE data initiating a root cause analysis to identify the main cause of the losses.
5. Implement planned maintenance
Choose which parts should receive proactive maintenance by looking at these three elements:
- Stress points
- Wear components
- Components that fail
After that, employ proactive maintenance intervals. These intervals are flexible and can (and should!) be adjusted whenever necessary.
Benefits of TPM
Implementing total productive maintenance (TPM) using the steps above brings a range of practical benefits for your manufacturing processes. By adopting TPM, you can optimize workflows, reduce downtime, and improve overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). For instance, a factory using TPM might see a major reduction in unexpected machine failures, leading to uninterrupted production and higher output.
TPM also fosters a culture of continuous improvement and employee involvement. By involving operators in maintenance tasks, you empower them to take ownership of their equipment. This boosts morale and fosters a safer work environment. Using TPM checklists helps standardize procedures, ensuring consistency and reliability in your maintenance efforts.
In addition, TPM’s focus on preventive maintenance helps you identify and address potential issues before they escalate, reducing the likelihood of unexpected breakdowns. From inspection checklists to root cause analysis, these practices not only save you time and money but also enhance the quality of your products.
How to use a TPM checklist
Following these principles, a total productive maintenance (TPM) checklist is used to assess a company’s progress toward achieving its goals in proper equipment maintenance. By using a structured checklist, manufacturing or production companies can evaluate important areas such as cleaning levels and team member involvement. Here are example TPM checklists that you can easily adapt to your workflow.
Start by evaluating the current state of your equipment and work environment with the checklist and identifying areas that need improvement. Make sure that all relevant team members are involved, including operators and maintenance personnel, then go through the checklist to systematically address each aspect of TPM, from autonomous maintenance to planned maintenance. Afterwards, log your findings and actions that need to be taken to address any issues.
A TPM checklist ensures that all team members are aligned in maintaining and improving production and quality systems. By applying TPM, companies can achieve a continuous production cycle with minimal breakdowns.
Introduce a TPM program with a checklist software
Lumiform’s audit app assists you in establishing a total productive maintenance program by providing you with a flexible, accessible and adjustable checklist service. Have your team perform any kind of quality audits wherever and whenever – from a smartphone or tablet, online or offline. Create checklists, edit them and stay up-to-date with real-time updates and automated analyses.
Lumiform can be whatever you need it to be – the fully flexible software is designed to serve you and adjust itself to your specific needs, no matter how big or small your organization, so that you can reach your highest potential.
- Pick and choose from our wide-ranging library of ready-made templates, so that you can quickly and safely take your operations digital.
- With Lumiform’s flexible form builder you can build your own checklists or adjust existing ones quickly and effortlessly.
- Our accessible mobile app helps you and your team to establish a TPM program with ease and save time and money in the long run.
- With our comprehensive and automated analysis feature you can uncover threats and errors fast and effectively. This way you can concentrate on improving processes continuously.