Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a practical and effective means of raising Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). By involving production workers in caring for manufacturing equipment, it leverages the skills in the maintenance function, enabling preventive maintenance and higher levels of equipment care.
This blog introduces TPM and describes the 8 principles or pillars on which it operates. It identifies the main benefits, discusses implementation challenges and explores its relationship to other maintenance methodologies.
What is total productive maintenance?
TPM is a proactive maintenance methodology that’s complementary to Lean manufacturing. At its core, it’s about engaging production workers in caring for the production assets they use. This reduces breakdowns and extends asset life, while improving workplace safety and the working environment.
As TPM reduces breakdowns and accidents, it reduces waste, increases capacity and improves metrics such as OEE. It also reduces maintenance costs and allows maintenance teams to focus on preventive maintenance (PM) efforts rather than addressing breakdowns and performing routine tasks that don’t need their diagnostic skills.
An emphasis on organization, standardization and workforce engagement means TPM meshes with Lean manufacturing. As with Kaizen and continuous improvement efforts, production workers are encouraged to play bigger roles in supporting and achieving output goals.
Understanding the 8 pillars of TPM
TPM is based on the foundation of 5S. This Lean tool is used for workplace organization through a process of sort, systemize, shine, standardize and sustain. This brings order to chaotic work environments, ensuring everything needed is close at hand, and no time is wasted trying to find tools, fixtures, forms or equipment.
The 8 pillars of TPM forming the streams of activity involved are:
- Administrative TPM
- Autonomous maintenance
- Planned maintenance
- Quality maintenance
- Focused improvement
- Early equipment management
- Training and education
- Safety, health and environment
Pillar 1: Autonomous maintenance
In TPM basic equipment maintenance tasks such as cleaning and inspecting are carried out by the people who work on the equipment. This frees maintenance personnel to focus on problem solving and carrying out preventive maintenance. It also increases workers’ connection to the equipment, helping them understand it better and to identify indications of future problems, such as small fluid leaks.
Pillar 2: Planned maintenance
Carrying out routine tasks like inspecting belt tensions and changing oil and filters helps prevent wear and other problems that lead to breakdowns. This planned maintenance, which may be done on an elapsed time or running hours basis, is a core element of TPM and is usually the responsibility of the maintenance function.
Pillar 3: Quality maintenance
Faults in equipment may not stop it running, but can result in defective products. This often results from increased variation, as might be caused by worn guides or bushings or from contamination. This pillar links maintenance activities with quality performance and the Quality Management System by ensuring work is performed as needed to prevent the manufacture of product outside acceptable limits or with other defects.
Pillar 4: Focused improvement
This pillar provides for continuous improvements efforts focused on addressing machine problems. For example, repeated microstoppages (where a fault occurs and is fixed by production workers), are disruptive. Potential safety hazards are another class of problem that may require creative solutions.
Focused improvement entails assembling a team of people who know the equipment and empowering them to find solutions. In doing so they will often employ problem-solving tools from Lean such as fishbone and cause and effect diagrams.
Pillar 5: Early equipment management
Maintenance technicians are very familiar with equipment that, with a little more thought during specification, design and installation, would be more reliable and easier to maintain. The early equipment management pillar addresses this by ensuring maintenance is considered during the acquisition process.
Examples of this approach include providing access doors and viewing points in convenient locations, better orientation of grease nipples and labeling of wires and connectors. It should also include establishing detailed preventive maintenance routines for improving equipment reliability.
Pillar 6: Training and education
Autonomous maintenance, Pillar 1, requires that production workers be taught how to safely perform the tasks needed. This might include using hand tools to remove and replace covers and guards. They also need to know the procedures to follow when potential problems are discovered.
When new equipment comes in (Pillar 5), maintenance technicians should be taught how it works and trained in the maintenance needed — technician skills must be kept current to equip them for using new tools and techniques like those associated with preventive and predictive maintenance.
Pillar 7: Safety, health and environment
Poorly maintained equipment can cause accidents and negatively impact the environment, both within the factory and externally. For example, frustration over microstoppages can prompt unsafe actions to maintain production. Environmental problems can result from causes such as ineffective dust and fume extraction, increased noise and leaking and overflowing pipes and tanks.
This pillar ensures attention is paid to such issues, with maintenance work being planned and carried out as appropriate.
Pillar 8: Administrative TPM
The 7 TPM pillars discussed above are as applicable to administrative activities as they are to manufacturing. This relates to equipment such as HVAC systems and lighting, infrastructure services and administrative processes.
As with factory Kaizen efforts, team-based problem solving, along with education and training, and the involvement of Quality Management, can reduce waste and inefficiency while improving working conditions.
Benefits of implementing TPM
TPM yields both tangible and intangible benefits for manufacturers. These flow from letting skilled maintenance personnel focus on developing, performing and improving PM activities rather than carrying out straightforward cleaning and inspection tasks.
Tangible benefits include:
- Higher OEE: Fewer unplanned breakdowns increase effective capacity.
- Lower maintenance costs: Breakdown maintenance is very expensive.
- Reduced levels of material waste: Fewer machine problems mean less variation and higher quality.
- Lower accident rates: Fewer stoppages mean less need to access equipment while it’s running.
- Improved PM schedule attainment: Maintenance technicians have the time to do PM rather than dealing with breakdowns.
Intangible benefits flow from the impact on morale of reducing disruption, improving working conditions and preventing accidents. In addition, for production workers, taking on more responsibility for asset care increases ownership and pride in the workplace.
Challenges faced during TPM implementation
For many manufacturers TPM is a substantial change in the way they approach asset care. Rather than being the domain of maintenance technicians, TPM involves an array of stakeholders, including production workers and managers. The main challenges encountered during implementation include:
- Resistance from stakeholders to take on more tasks
- Maintenance technicians relinquishing their workload
- Managers concerned over the potential loss of output due to workers cleaning and inspecting
For production workers the approach is to emphasize job enrichment along with less frustration, greater control over working conditions and better safety. It is important to stress that full training will be provided.
Likewise, maintenance technicians need to understand how TPM will free them to put their skills to better use. Involving technicians in worker training also helps build buy in to the program.
While often skeptical initially, managers will be swayed by data showing performance improvements. This is obtained by running a pilot TPM implementation in a carefully selected target area. Good candidates are small, relatively self-contained lines or cells with high visibility and where confidence in success is high.
Comparing TPM with other maintenance methodologies
Where TPM differs from other types of industrial maintenance is in the way it involves those who work on and use industrial equipment rather than restricting it to the maintenance team. Its effectiveness flows from how it builds ownership among production workers while leveraging maintenance skills for more complex PM activities.
TPM is complimentary to both Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma through its emphasis on continuous improvement and variation reduction. Plus, like both these methodologies, it’s highly visible and straightforward. Indeed, it’s often argued that these characteristics make it more effective than other approaches to continuous improvement.
Summarizing the total productive maintenance approach
Although less widely used than Lean manufacturing, TPM has the potential to help manufacturers improve operational efficiency and reduce costs. The keys to success are to master the 8 pillars to achieve high levels of employee involvement and support from management.
Mastery of all 8 pillars, and not just autonomous maintenance, is essential to maximize the benefits realized. The transfer of some maintenance work to production workers cannot be achieved without thoroughly addressing the other 7 as these are what builds employee involvement.
Looking to the future, TPM will increasingly be understood as vital to Lean manufacturing success, because it brings the stability needed for predictable work. Likewise, its ability to reduce variation will increasingly be recognized as a requirement for Six Sigma.
As the leader in outsourced industrial maintenance services, we help manufacturers improve asset care through deployment of methodologies and technologies from TPM to predictive maintenance. Contact us to learn more.
