An Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance (tpm)

An Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)

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By Venkatesh J

What is Total Productive Maintenance ( TPM ) ?

It can be considered as the medical science of machines. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance program which involves a newly defined concept for maintaining plants and equipment. The goal of the TPM program is to markedly increase production while, at the same time, increasing employee morale and job satisfaction.

TPM brings maintenance into focus as a necessary and vitally important part of the business. It is no longer regarded as a non-profit activity. Down time for maintenance is scheduled as a part of the manufacturing day and, in some cases, as an integral part of the manufacturing process. The goal is to hold emergency and unscheduled maintenance to a minimum.

Why TPM ?

TPM was introduced to achieve the following objectives. The important ones are listed below.

Avoid wastage in a quickly changing economic environment.

Producing goods without reducing product quality.

Reduce cost.

Produce a low batch quantity at the earliest possible time.

Goods send to the customers must be non defective.

Similarities and differences between TQM and TPM :

The TPM program closely resembles the popular Total Quality Management (TQM) program. Many of the tools such as employee empowerment, benchmarking, documentation, etc. used in TQM are used to implement and optimize TPM.Following are the similarities between the two.

Total commitment to the program by upper level management is required in both programmes

Employees must be empowered to initiate corrective action, and

A long range outlook must be accepted as TPM may take a year or more to implement and is an on-going process. Changes in employee mind-set toward their job responsibilities must take place as well.

The differences between TQM and TPM is summarized below.

Category TQM TPM

Object Quality ( Output and effects ) Equipment ( Input and cause )

Mains of attaining goal Systematize the management. It is software oriented Employees participation and it is hardware oriented

Target Quality for PPM Elimination of losses and wastes.

Types of maintenance :

1. Breakdown maintenance :

It means that people waits until equipment fails and repair it. Such a thing could be used when the equipment failure does not significantly affect the operation or production or generate any significant loss other than repair cost.

2. Preventive maintenance ( 1951 ):

It is a daily maintenance ( cleaning, inspection, oiling and re-tightening ), design to retain the healthy condition of equipment and prevent failure through the prevention of deterioration, periodic inspection or equipment condition diagnosis, to measure deterioration. It is further divided into periodic maintenance and predictive maintenance. Just like human life is extended by preventive medicine, the equipment service life can be prolonged by doing preventive maintenance.

2a. Periodic maintenance ( Time based maintenance - TBM) :

Time based maintenance consists of periodically inspecting, servicing and cleaning equipment and replacing parts to prevent sudden failure and process problems.

2b. Predictive maintenance :

This is a method in which the service life of important part is predicted based on inspection or diagnosis, in order to use the parts to the limit of their service life. Compared to periodic maintenance, predictive maintenance is condition based maintenance. It manages trend values, by measuring and analyzing data about deterioration and employs a surveillance system, designed to monitor conditions through an on-line system.

3. Corrective maintenance ( 1957 ) :

It improves equipment and its components so that preventive maintenance can be carried out reliably. Equipment with design weakness must be redesigned to improve reliability or improving maintainability

4. Maintenance prevention ( 1960 ):

It indicates the design of a new equipment. Weakness of current machines are sufficiently studied ( on site information leading to failure prevention, easier maintenance and prevents of defects, safety and ease of manufacturing ) and are incorporated before commissioning a new equipment.

TPM - History:

TPM is a innovative Japanese concept. The origin of TPM can be traced back to 1951 when preventive maintenance was introduced in Japan. However the concept of preventive maintenance was taken from USA. Nippondenso was the first company to introduce plant wide preventive maintenance in 1960. Preventive maintenance is the concept wherein, operators produced goods using machines and the maintenance group was dedicated with work of maintaining those machines, however with the automation of Nippondenso, maintenance became a problem as more maintenance personnel were required. So the management decided that the routine maintenance of equipment would be carried out by the operators. ( This is Autonomous maintenance, one of the features of TPM ). Maintenance group took up only essential maintenance works.

Thus Nippondenso which already followed preventive maintenance also added Autonomous maintenance done by production operators. The maintenance crew went in the equipment modification for improving reliability. The modifications were made or incorporated in new equipment. This lead to maintenance prevention. Thus preventive maintenance along with Maintenance prevention and Maintainability Improvement gave birth to Productive maintenance. The aim of productive maintenance was to maximize plant and equipment effectiveness to achieve optimum life cycle cost of production equipment.

By then Nippon Denso