What is total productive maintenance (TPM)?

The goal of TPM is to free production processes from equipment breakdowns and downtime during their lifecycle.

Moreover, the maintenance practices that must be administered begin with early equipment management activities and extend throughout their lifecycle. These practices are the shared burden of all employees, not merely the assumed property of maintenance staff.

This notion of shared employee responsibility represents a radical idea, but it’s one that’s being incorporated more often. For example, the initiative to achieve comprehensive cybersecurity is now seen as a collective responsibility that requires the best efforts of all employees to ensure success. At a minimum, businesses routinely task employees with continuing education efforts designed to keep pace with the latest cybersecurity trends.

Total productive maintenance (TPM) fosters a work environment in which cross-functional teams are dispatched to manage specific remediation efforts. The guiding idea is to structure these teams to be small and multi-disciplined, with representatives of different departments engaged for their particular expertise.

Part of the guiding notion behind TPM is that if the entire company is responsible for the maintenance management, it’s less likely that key maintenance tasks are neglected.

Similarly, because maintenance is being applied more rigorously across the board and is on everyone’s collective inter-company radar, the likelihood of outright equipment failures is reduced. In other words, if everyone’s busy watching the store, it’s probably unlikely that someone can come along and steal that store.

Implementing total productive maintenance can be challenging, as it frequently is when responsibilities are being reallocated. However, the upside of TPM implementation is often well worth any growing pains. Companies that make the switch and successfully engage the implementation process are better positioned to mitigate quality issues. This approach enables machines, maintenance personnel and other designated employees to maximize uptime.

Total productive maintenance (TPM) incorporates various forms of maintenance. While each supports TPM in its own unique way, they all take a heavily proactive approach to maintenance management.

They need to because TPM is hunting significant game, aiming to manage conditions enough to achieve a rarefied state of “perfect” production—where virtually no defects, accidents or stoppages occur.

Perfection is a demanding pursuit, attainable only through persistent effort and strong managerial commitment. This leads us to a set of core strategies known collectively as the “8 pillars of TPM.” These pillars serve as an exemplary model of how to structure maintenance as a shared, company-wide project.

Here’s what each pillar entails:

The term owes its origins to the Japanese self-improving concept “Kaizen,” which seeks to engender improvements that make a considerable improvement in performance while not being prohibitively expensive. In the early 1970s, Toyota introduced TPM in Japan, driven by its component maker Nippondenso.

Examples of focused improvement might include a factory that adjusts the height of its individual workstations. As a result, a worker’s physical motions can be optimized, increasing their output without requiring any major infrastructure investment. Focused process improvement seeks this kind of simple and cost-effective way to enhance productivity.

Planned maintenance boils down to establishing a maintenance schedule, often defined through a maintenance calendar. It also involves ensuring that necessary activities occur on time during manufacturing processes and updating the schedule as circumstances dictate.

Planned maintenance is the full expression of preventive maintenance. It includes actions such as conducting regular inspections to ensure equipment availability and employing checklists as a data backstop.

It also includes specific actions related to support equipment reliability, such as the calibration, cleaning and lubrication of machinery.

Heard the expression “Quality in, Quality out” (QUQO)? It’s a principle stating that product quality or system performance is a direct result of what goes into that product or system. Quality maintenance is based on QUQO reasoning and seeks to assess the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of machinery.

Quality maintenance is often confused with quality management, but while the terms are closely aligned, they are nonetheless distinct. Quality maintenance is largely about equipment upkeep, while quality management is a separate process of setting quality goals and achieving a baseline level of performance.

A key maintenance strategy, autonomous maintenance shifts responsibility for individual workstation equipment to the machine operators who’ve been assigned to work with that equipment.

This approach is considerably different than common situations involving maintenance teams that are charged with such responsibilities. Here, workers manage maintenance tasks like lubrication and cleaning of equipment themselves, handling routine maintenance and thus freeing up technicians for thornier equipment problems.

This form of maintenance methodology tracks new equipment assets from the very start of their lifespan and concentrates on key upkeep steps. Early equipment management (EEM) represents a concerted effort to find and isolate equipment problems earlier within the equipment lifecycle, including during the design phase, if possible.

EEM supports OEE with increased reliability and improved performance. Further benefits include easier equipment startup (to achieve full production capacity faster), as well as fewer productivity losses and less unplanned downtime.

TPM isn’t simply about equipment operation. As the adage suggests, the devil is often in the details. Managing the myriad details, the offices and bureaucracies ensure ongoing business continuity by overseeing the daily minutiae of factory production.

TPM is supposed to be a company-wide undertaking, so it includes these administrative departments. TPM tasks these areas with streamlining their operations where possible to improve productivity.

The TPM process works when everyone involved pushes a shared and coordinated effort to remain proactive about maintenance.

This requirement most notably includes confirming that engineers, technicians and line workers are basing their actions off the best and latest industry information and accepted best practices. Training operators properly depends on nothing less.

The final pillar concentrates on the operating conditions present in the work environment.  

Core questions:

• Are there any known health hazards in that environment?
• How are those threats being mitigated to support greater overall worker safety?
• Is the company compliant with workplace safety standards enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)?
• Are there accessibility questions that need to be addressed, in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?

An organization can gauge the success of its total productive maintenance (TPM) program observationally by monitoring maintenance status and assessing it based on how well the maintenance program appears to be working. However, a much more precise means of TPM assessment involves the use of key metrics.

OEE is the most important of these metrics, giving a broad view of maintenance effectiveness. Further metrics provide a more detailed picture of TPM.

These metrics include mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean Time to Repair (MTTR). Both provide valuable insights that are measured chronologically. MTBF details how much time elapses between equipment breakdowns and production stoppages.

MTTR assesses how long it takes from the issuance of a work order for the repair to fix problems and resume production. This process would include the duration needed for changeovers to other systems to go into effect.

These metrics are invaluable in several notable ways. First, they assist in problem-solving efforts by providing information about quantifiable results. Armed with this type of real-time data, an organization can make better-informed decisions, instead of relying upon mere hunches and best guesses.

Another service provided by metrics is revealing a full picture of maintenance costs incurred and how they compare to past maintenance expenditures.

TPM metrics prove useful in another essential way. They help enable the deeper study of systemic failures and why they occur in the first place.

Root cause analysis, for example, supports TPM by applying an almost forensic approach to equipment failures and system disruptions. The goal is to identify the core reasons behind those problems.

Likely culprits usually include inadequate design, the use of incorrect equipment parts and plain old human error.

While TPM focuses intently on maintenance, TPM is just one piece of a larger approach known as lean manufacturing. Per its name, it works to streamline production practices in order to limit waste, rework ineffective solutions and improve overall efficiency.