Total Productive Maintenance
TPM
Total productive maintenance TPM ( also known as Total Ppreventive Maintenance) is a system for equipment maintenance to avoid defects, downtime, machine stoppages, and incidents or accidents. It can be implemented as a full program by itself or as a tool within the Lean methodology. TPM requires the participation of all workers, from maintenance staff till managers, engineers, and quality inspectors. It focuses on reduction of major machine losses that weakens the equipment in terms of downtime, changeover time, minor stops, speed losses, scrap, and rework. It addresses the total life cycle of the equipment to revise maintenance practices, activities, and improvements in relation to where equipment is in its life cycle.
TPM can maximize machinery effectiveness, involves every single worker and is based on promotion of preventive maintenance through workforce motivation. The aim of Total Productive Maintenance is to accomplish equipment efficiency and eliminate failures to equipment and breakdowns. It helps reduce minor machine stoppages caused by abnormal operation and work blockage. TPM also helps to reduce defect and scraps and improve yield and production stability.
TPM Pillars
The 8 Pillars of TPM are as follows:
- Jishu hozen: A Japanese term that means “autonomous maintenance.” Operators are trained to achieve basic routine maintenance (for example machine cleaning, inspecting, shining). This eventually frees up the maintenance team to only focus on complex issues. This will enable workers to improve skills, knowledge, competence and will incur ownership.
- Kaizen/focused improvement: Kaizen, a Japanese term, means “small improvements” is a critical component of lean. Analysing the systems and identifying waste and nonvalue-adding activities will help in setting goals, evaluating progress, and solving related issues.
- Early equipment management: Improved thinking on equipment maintenance through TPM can happen with Early equipment management (EEM), which is a strategy of applying applied knowledge to equipment design. This benefits the overall maintenance program and considers essentials for easier changeover and increased safety features.
- Health, Safety and Environment: The focus on ensuring workplace safety and being free from hazards. It is important to make sure that Health and Safety is incorporated in designing new equipment and their related maintenance procedures. The target for zero incidents should be achieved with risk assessments, hazard analysis, training, and procedures.
- Planned maintenance: The maintenance activities need to be proactive rather than reactive. Servicing equipment on breaks down only and not performing routine maintenance is not desirable and there will be corrections instead of preventive actions.
- Quality maintenance: Defect detection and prevention to eliminate quality issues is vital in TPM. The elements of the production process which are critical to quality should be the focal point and root causes identification should be done thoroughly.
- Training and education: An effective training program is important to the successfully implementation of TPM. All workers must know about TPM and its importance. Workers should be trained on performing the routine maintenance and problems identification. Maintenance team needs to be well trained on preventive maintenance.
- Office TPM: TPM should be reinforced by the organization’s administrative group. Office TPM intends to improve efficiency and reduce losses like long setup times, breakdown time and idle time.
OEE
Overall Equipment Effectiveness
One of the main objectives of TPM is to increase the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of equipment.
OEE = Performance x Availability x Quality
6 Major Losses
The 3 factors of OEE (Performance, Availability & Quality) has 2 associated losses, resulting in 6 major losses:
Performance losses: running at reduced speed, Minor Stops
Availability losses: Breakdowns, Product changeover
Quality losses: Startup rejects, Running rejects
The objective finally is to identify, prioritize and eventually eliminate the causes of the losses.
Total productive maintenance is not about a one-time tool and should be an integral part of the organisational system. Maintenance of production needs to be the responsibility of all the organisation’s department instead of the maintenance department alone. This is how the purpose of TPM is effectively embedded in the production improvement culture.
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