What is Total Productive Maintenance

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is an innovative approach to maintenance that is executed systematically that optimizes equipment effectiveness, eliminates breakdowns and promotes autonomous operator maintenance through day-to-day activities involving the total workforce in the organization.

TPM can be considered as the medical science of machines which involves a newly defined concept for maintaining plants and equipment. 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.

TPM is a proactive approach that essentially aims to prevent any kind of breakdowns before occurrence. Its motto is “zero defect, zero waste, zero breakdown and zero work-related accident.”

History of TPM

TPM originated in Japan and was an equipment management strategy designed to support the Total Quality Management strategy. The Japanese realized that companies cannot produce a consistent quality product with poorly maintained equipment.

Nakajima began studying preventive Maintenance in 1950. The focus in Japan was then primarily on the preventive maintenance. As new equipment was installed, the focus was on implementing the preventive maintenance as recommended by the equipment manufacturer. Thus a high value was placed on equipment that operated at designed specifications with no breakdowns.

In 1962 Nakajima first visited United States to study in greater details of the American way of doing preventive maintenance. Since then he visited the American and European manufacturing facilities to study and learn about their Preventive Maintenance systems. Based on the valuable lessons learned from the American and European preventive maintenance system, Nakajima developed Total Productive Maintenance in 1971.

Major Features of TPM

Nakaiima described the word “total” in TPM into three major features:

1. Total effectiveness - indicates TPM’s pursuit of economic efficiency and profitability of the organization
2. Total maintenance system - includes maintenance prevention (MP) and maintainability improvement (MI), as well as preventive maintenance (PM). This refers to “maintenance-free” design through the incorporation of reliability, maintainability, and the support characteristics into the equipment design.
3. Total participation of all employees – includes autonomous maintenance by operators through small group activities. Essentially, maintenance is accomplished through a “team” effort, with the operator being responsible for the ultimate care of the equipment that he / she is operating through the Cleaning, Lubrication, Adjustment, Inspection and Retightening (CLAIR) that is empowered to them.

Key Elements of TPM

According to Nakaiima, the concept of TPM consists of five key elements:

1. TPM aims to maximize equipment effectiveness (overall equipment effictiveness)
2. TPM establishes a thorough system of preventive maintenance (PM) to lengthen the equipment’s life span and increase its effectiveness
3. 3. TPM is implemented by various departments in a company (engineering, operations, and maintenance). It’s requires a cross functional team effort to make it a success.
4. 4. TPM involves every single employee from top management to the employees on the factory floor from the initial TPM pilot team to the TPM Big Bang when is fan-out across the organization.
5. 5. TPM is based on the promotion of preventive maintenance (PM) through “motivation management” through autonomous small group activities.

There are also other key elements of TPM which are not mentioned by Nakajima:

1. TPM is helps establish a close relationship between man and machine and how these two elements work together in harmony to get the maximum effectiveness
2. TPM is about how organization utilizes it resources to improve work standards, the effectiveness of the equipments and people to raise its level of operational excellence and bottom line
3. TPM is a long term investment made by organization but potentially it has a high yield of return through gains from cost saving and cost avoidance if implemented systematically
4. The TPM process is along and continuous one. It takes time for the employees to learn, change, adapt to new ways, methodology and systems
5. TPM need strong continuous commitment and patience not only from the top management but everyone who is involved in the strategic implementation because it can be difficult, time consuming and hard to implement

Eight Pillars of TPM

• TPM identifies the 16 types of waste or muda that exist in organization and then works systematically to eliminate them by making continuous improvements. TPM has 8 pillars of activity and each pillar has a “zero” target to achieve. Following are the eight pillars of TPM:
• Autonomous Maintenance (AM)/ (Jishu-Hozen): in autonomous maintenance, the operator is the key player. It involves daily maintenance activities carried out by the operators themselves that prevent the deterioration of the equipment.
• Autonomous Maintenance is central to a successful TPM process where operators take care of their own equipment. It starts with basic cleaning, inspection, retightening and lubrication and later involved the operators with minor adjustment and repair (DeWesse).
• Kobetsu Kaizen or Focus Improvement (KK): for eliminating waste (six major losses)
• Planned Maintenance (PM): for achieving zero breakdowns
• Training: for increasing productivity. The TPM training starts eith the management team. The TPM process depends on significant skill development for the operators and support group. This involves generic TPM implementation training, on-the- job, teaming technical and problem solving skill development.
• Safety: for achieving zero work-related accidents and for protecting the environment
• Early Equipment Management: to reduce waste occurring during the implementation of a new machine or the production of a new product. All lessons learned in the continuous improvement of existing equipments and processes must be incorporated into the development of new products, processes and equipment. Tacit knowledge of operators, technicians and engineers are retrieved and feedback to designers and builders so that new machines are easier to operate and maintain.
• Quality Maintenance (QM) / (Hinshitsu-Hozen): This is actually “maintenance for quality”. It includes the most effective quality tool of TPM: “poka yoke”, which aims to achieve zero loss by taking necessary measures to prevent loss.
• Office TPM: for involvement of all parties to TPM since office processes can be improved in a similar manner as well

Each pillar is headed by a Pillar Champion who coordinates the pillar activities. Most often these Pillar Champions are members of the TPM Steering Committee. Of the eight, the first five pillars are critical at the initial stage of the TPM implementation.

Objectives of TPM

TPM aims to establish good maintenance practice through the pursuit of “the five goals of TPM” (Nakajima)

• Improve equipment effectiveness: examine the effectiveness of facilities by identifying and examining all losses which occur such as downtime losses, speed losses and defect losses and take appropriate actions to minimize or eliminate them
• Achieve autonomous maintenance: allow the employees who operate equipment to take responsibility of the basic maintenance tasks. This can be at :
• The repair level (where staff carry out instructions as a response to a problem);
• The prevention level (where employees take pro-active action to prevent foreseen problems);
• Improvement level (where employees not only takes corrective action but also propose improvements to prevent recurrence)
• Plan maintenance: have a systematic approach to all maintenance activities. This involves the identification of the nature and level of preventive maintenance required for each piece of equipment, the creation of standards for condition-based maintenance, and the setting of respective responsibilities for operating and maintenance staff. The respective roles of “operating” and “maintenance” staff are seen as being distinct. Maintenance crew are seen as developing preventive actions and general breakdown services, whereas operating staff take on the “ownership” of the facilities and their general care. Maintenance crew typically move to a more facilitating and supporting role where they are responsible for the training of operators, problem diagnosis, and devising and assessing maintenance practice.
• Train all employees in basic maintenance skills: the defined responsibilities of operating and maintenance crew require that each has all the necessary skills to carry out these roles. TPM places a heavy emphasis on appropriate and continuous training.
• Achieve early equipment management: the aim is to move towards zero maintenance through “maintenance prevention” (MP). MP involves considering failure causes and the maintainability of equipment during its design stage, its manufacture, its installation, and its commissioning. As part of the overall process, TPM attempts to track all potential maintenance problems back to their root cause so that they can be eliminated at the earliest point in the overall design, manufacture and deployment process.

TPM and TQM

There is a close relationship and resemblance between the TPM program and the Total Quality Management (TQM) program. The TPM philosophy actually complements supports and reinforces the TQM principles and initiatives carried out by the organization. It is therefore highly important that TPM should not be made as a separate strategic initiative. Instead it should be integrated into the TQM strategic initiative.

Many of the tools such as employee involvement in continuous improvement activities, proper documentation, training and development, benchmarking, and many other tools and techniques used in TQM are also commonly in the TPM implementation. Following are the similarities between the TPM and TQM (Venkatesh):

1. Total and continuous commitment towards the program by top management is required fro both programs without which do not even think of implementing them
2. Both programs involve employees, at the lowest level in particular, in continuous improvement. They are empower to identify problems, establish root causes, initiate corrective action and convert the problem into opportunities using scientific method. To be able to do this major emphasis on training / education, coaching and facilitation is required.
3. A long range outlook must be accepted as TPM may take a year or more to implement and is an on-going process. It involves a cultural change and changing the employee’s mind-set and behaviors toward their job responsibilities will be a challenge. This requires time, continuous reinforcement and need to be managed tactfully.

Comparatively, TPM has almost all the essential elements in the Kaizen Umbrella:

• Total Quality Control
• Customer Orientation
• Small Group Activities
• Suggestion System
• Automation
• Discipline in the Workplace
• Quality Improvement
• Zero Defects
• Cooperative Labour (Teamwork)
• Management Relationship

The DNA of Toyota production system

TPM is a slow, tedious and difficult process to implement if not carefully plan and strategize. Simplification of the process into sequential logical steps which is easily understood and applicable to the targets is critical to ensure successful implementation of this program. An insight of the Toyota Production System (TPS) will be of most help to ensure a smooth and flawless implementation by adopting and adapting the TPS rules.

The tacit knowledge that underlies the Toyota Production System can be categorized into four basic rules (Spear & Bowen). These rules guide the design, operation, and improvement of every activity, connection, and pathway for every product and services in the Toyota operating systems. The rules are as follows:

Rule 1: All work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing, and outcome.

Toyota’s managers recognize that the devil is in the details of the work content. For this reason they ensure that all work at Toyota is highly specified as to content, sequence, timing, and outcome. This is applied to the activities of all employees regardless of their functional specialty or hierarchical role. This rule creates standardization of processes and the probability of achieving similar results and lesser defects is high

Rule 2: Every customer-supplier connection must be direct, and there must be an unambiguous yes-or-no way to send requests and receive responses.

The second rule of TPS rule explains how people who perform the process get connected with one another. What this basically means is that the connection between processes must be:

• Standardized and direct
• Specify clearly the people involved
• The form and quantity of the goods and services to be provided
• The way requests are made by each customer
• The expected time in which the requests will be met

The rule creates a supplier-customer relationship between each processes and employees in the operations.

Rule 3: The pathway for every product and service must be simple and direct.

All production lines at Toyota have to been set up so that every product and service flows along a simple and specified path. This ensures that goods and services do not flow necessarily flow to the next available person or machine but to a specific person or machine. It has also enables Toyota to create flexibility and accommodate variety of product lines in its operations. The defined path will not change unless the production line is expressly redesigned.

Rule 4: Any improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organization.

Rule 4 stipulates that any improvement activities made on the shop floor to the operational activities, to connections between workers or machines or to pathways must be made in accordance with the scientific method. The activities are to be under the guidance of a teacher and carried out at the lowest possible organizational level who is the employees.

To be able to do this effectively, Toyota first taught their employees to improve their problem-solving skills by encouraging them to redesign their own work. This has become the first step of problem solving experienced by the employees buy focusing on the own work standards. Then the employees were assigned a leader who trained, coach and facilitate them to solve the problems systematically by formulating action plan and testing hypotheses. Such methodology has taught them how to use the scientific method to design their team’s work in accordance with the first three rules.

Toyota’s Notion of the Ideal

By inculcating the scientific method at all levels of the workforce, Toyota ensures that people will clearly state the expectations they will be testing when they implement the changes they have planned (Spear and Bowen)

This notion of the ideal is very pervasive. Workers at Toyota have a concrete definition in mind which consistent throughout the organization. Very specifically, for Toyota’s workers, the output of an ideal person, group of people, or machine:

• Is defect free (that it, it has the features and performance the customer expects)
• Can be delivered one request at a time (a batch size of one)
• Can be supplied on demand in the version requested
• Can be delivered immediately
• Can be produced without wasting any materials, labor, energy, or other resources (such as costs associated with inventory); and
• Can be produced in a work environment that is safe physically, emotionally, and professionally for every employee

Small group activities

SGA may be defined as informal, voluntary small groups organized within the company to carry out specific task in the workshop (Masaki Imai). According to Hirota and Veda, the SGA promotes itself and satisfies company goals as well as individual employee need through concrete activities. Professor Emeritus Kunio Okada of Tokyo University argued that SGA should be integrated into the corporate structure so that their activities can complement and enhance other organizational activities.

SGA has become the primary mechanism and nucleus of the strategic implementation of TPM. It is therefore extremely important that this factor is considered in the TPM framework.

Depending on their aims SGA come in various forms:

• QC Circle
• Zero Defect (ZD) Movement
• Non-error Movement
• Level-up Movement
• Mini Think Tank
• Suggestion Group
• Safety Group
• Workshop Involvement or Workshop Talk Group
• Productivity Committee
• Management by Objective (MBO)

Japanese organizations strongly believed that their primary mission is to produce superior quality product or services that satisfy market requirement. To achieve this mission at an accelerated speed, they have employed virtually every means available such as statistical tools, TQC and QC Circles. They have succeeded in achieving their mission through the adoption of such strategy.

One of the most prominent SGA is the QC Circle. It is a small group of departmental production operators and line leaders who have volunteered to spent time outside of their regular hours to solve departmental quality problems The QC circle movement originated in Japan in 1962. It began as a study groups and was later focusing problem solving in the manufacturing floor. Today the QC Circle activities have expanded to include suppliers and contractors.

Key Success Factors to SGA

The three factors that determine the success of the SGA are motivation, ability and a favorable working environment (Hirota and Veda). It is the responsibility of the management to institute these factors in the organizations. Of the three key elements as described in figure 3.9, motivation and ability are the employee’s responsibility. Management holds the responsibility of creating such favorable working environment.

Management’s first responsibility is to provide the necessary training to develop a highly capable and motivated workforce. Education enables employees to understand themselves by exploring areas such as human drives, motivation and group dynamics.

Management’s second responsibility is to create a favorable work environment by eliminating psychological and physical obstacles. The creation of favorable psychological environment involves changing management style form authoritarian to participative management. Creating a physical environment involves creating a management system that supports the SGA. Examples of the physical environments are team display boards, meeting rooms and setting standards. All these would help to increase the level of enthusiasm of the SGA members because they feel that management is supporting their activities.

Benefits of SGA

Following are some of the major benefits of SGA (Nakajima):

• It created a team based organization comprising of many SGA working on quality improvement projects that is directly supporting the organizational goals and objectives.
• The SGA is empowered to set their own goals and objectives. This has become a motivational factor that helps to instill a strong sense of belonging and responsibility to the organization as well as the team. There was a great sense of achievement especially when they were given the opportunity to share their results with the management.
• Although the SGA worked independently, they liased a great deal with the relevant people from within or other departments whenever they need help to support their quality improvement projects.
• Responsibilities are equally shared between the team members. Practically every members of the team has a designated task. Roles and expectation of the task’s champion were clearly defined and the results regularly updated
• Top-down and bottom-up and inter-departmental communications were significantly improved. Any abnormality detected such as defective parts, gross errors and low process yield were feedback immediately to the relevant people for corrective action.
• Morale and enthusiasm of the team members were generally high because SGA were recognized as an important element in the quality improvement activity by top management. High level of commitment and endless support given by the management was a great morale booster to keep the team moving forward.
• The SGA has created an opportunity for the employees to learn and acquire new knowledge and skills. It also allowed them to share their knowledge, skills and experiences with the rest of the member.
• Besides becoming a training and development avenue for the employees, SGA also provide the team members the opportunity to exhibit their hidden talent, creativity and innovative ideas. Many potential leaders, artist, presenters, and trainers were identified during SGA.

SGA has become a source of resources in quality improvement program. Even though the projects undertaken by the SGA resulted in small gains of quality improvement, in the long run it would bring about significant results. Without SGA, even these small projects would be left to the management.

Key Issues in a SGA

Following are some of the key issues faced by most quality improvement teams that need to be address by management (Schmidt, Kiemele and Berdine). Careful planning and a systematic execution of actions are essential to avoid any adverse impact that would affect the team progress and morale in strategic implementation of TPM.

Goals

Goals set must be directly related to customer satisfaction and organizational issues. Each quality improvement teams must know who their internal and external customers are. These teams have to ensure that the goals set satisfy the customer needs.

Total Involvement

The whole organization should be involved in the quality improvement team process. This involves all departments and employees in the organization. One of the main objectives the quality improvement teams is to identify opportunities and find ways to improve. Their performance measurements should be customer focused. They use appropriate tools to implement he improvement process.

Management Support

Following are some of the key ways that management can support the teams:

• Provide training in the use of tools and in the team improvement process
• Address all team recommendations appropriately
• Provide necessary resources
• Guide project selection by providing clear customer focused goals
• Participate on team project as active an member
• Do not interrupt the proceeding of team meetings
• Celebrate small victory
• Set timeline goals
• Coordinate team follow-ups
• Regular review of team or project status

Team size

An ideal size of the team is between five to eight members.

Team Make-up

Members of the team should make of those employees who are directly involved in the process such as the production operators, quality control inspectors and line technicians or more commonly called natural work group. Some organizations have also included employees who are not directly involved in the process such the buyer or planner. They found it very helpful.

Quick, Cheap and Simple

One of the biggest Returns on Investment from the continuous quality improvement process comes from quick, cheap and simple changes. Most of the time the results are too small for the team to quantify. However if those results are accumulated the figures might be encouraging. Therefore continuous quality improvement teams must encourage focusing on changes that are quick, cheap and simple.

Number of projects

One-way to ensure that the quality improvement process continues is to set goals for the number of projects to be completed in a year. Status of projects needs to be reviewed at regular intervals by top management. This becomes part of the reinforcement process where the team activities are monitored and results evaluated.

Cultural impact will result in many collateral projects

As the quality improvement teams get matured, there will be many minor and major improvement projects occurring concurrently. To ensure the organization reaped a good return of investment, all these projects must be tactfully coordinated and managed. This is especially so when there are limited resources to support the project or when it becomes very costly. The perception that management is not supportive of the projects to be implemented by the teams should be avoided.

How to implement the process

It is important to have trained personnel facilitating or coaching the quality improvement teams. Most often there are only a few personnel who are trained and have the experience in coaching quality improvement process in the organization. If the cost of hiring external consultant were expensive, the best method would be hands on experience. Instead of playing the single role of coaches, they get involve directly and play a dual role a coach and team member. This will help to accelerate their tacit knowledge of the quality improvement process. They can later share their experiences with the other coaches or facilitators.

Change Management

For a process to be changed, people must also change. Process improvements are the results of changes made through people involvement. Managing the changes is a massive job. Quality improvement management teams need to have the change management skill for them to facilitate the change process.

Cost of implementing TPM

Followings are cost associated to the TPM Strategic Implementation for all the pillar activities (S&C TPM Office, Texas Instruments, M’sia):

1. Direct Cost of TPM Members
   • The direct cost of TPM Members includes those cost of the members of the TPM Office and those permanent resources such as TPM trainers
2. Direct cost of other Company Personnel
   • Cost of other personnel who are indirectly involves in the strategic implementation activities
3. Cost of any external resources required
   • Cost of engaging external trainers or consultants to train targets and facilitate the TPM processes during the early stage of implementation. This also includes cost of external training and benchmarking involved by members of the TPM Office and Pillar Champions.
4. Cost of spare parts, tools and other items
   • Cost of spares, supplies, tools and expenses incurred that are required or used in the Autonomous Maintenance, Kobetsu Kaizen, PM, Safety and Quality Maintenance Pillar Activities either during the restoration of improvement process.
5. Training and consultancy support cost
   • Training and consultancy hours provided by in-house consultants or subject matter experts who form part of the teaming support structure.
6. Lost production revenue due to the need to stop the process for TPM Activities
7. Total involvements of employees in the TPM activities require equipments and processes to be shutdown. This involves substantial potential lost of revenue.

Benefits of TPM

Gaining Competitive Advantage

TPM focus on the Six Major Losses and also on Man, Machine and Workplace aim primarily at increasing equipment effectiveness and achieving zero breakdown, defect, waste and accident respectively. This strategy addresses the ever changing customer care abouts which are:

• Superior Quality products / services
• Lower Cost / Unit
• Shorter Cycle-Time / Lead Time
• Greater Dependability through continuity of supply
• Flexibility in the operations to meet the up-swing and down-swing

To achieve these aims, it involves the involvement of employees in the entire organization to translate these customer care abouts into the operational perspectives. The successful implementation of the TPM activities helps organization to:

• Create error free processes to assure superior quality products / services to be delivered to the customers
• Increase the productivity level
• Increase the speed of processing by shortening the cycle-time
• Create a reliable operations which are stable that can ensure continuity of supply to the customers and meeting the on-time delivery commit
• Has the flexibility to respond quickly to changes in demand

These attributes give the organization the competitive advantage over its competitors with the ability to do it right, do it cheap, do it fast, do it on-time and do it differently.

Lowering the Manufacturing Cost

The increase in operational effectiveness has significant impact on the manufacturing cost structure. Reduction in cost of goods sold in the form of cost avoidances or cost savings increase the gross profit margin and ultimately profit from operations.

Cost Avoidance

• Increase in overall equipment effectiveness saves the organization from purchasing new equipments
• When purchase of new equipments are deferred or cancelled, potential cost of cost of depreciation is avoided
• Other overhead coast is also avoided because space required for new equipments is avoided
• Manufacturing overhead is avoided because no additional operators are required since additional equipments are no longer required

Cost Savings

1.  
   • Increase in yield or quality rate reduces the material usages leading to cost savings in material cost and inventory cost
   • Improvement in the performance rate allows the employees to produce more quality outputs from the same number of equipments operated and operating hours worked. Thus unnecessary overtime is no longer required which has a significant impact on cost saving of the manufacturing overhead cost.
   • Increase in performance rate allows the operations to be operated with higher operator to equipment. This is a cost saving on the manufacturing overhead. The excess operators can be reassigned to other operations where they are most needed.
   • At 95% or higher availability rate, the equipments are operating at maximum effectiveness. Minor / major breakdown is minimal and this has positive impact on the cost saving of spares.

Meeting Organizational Objectives

The adoption of the TPM Philosophy can be a platform for organization to achieve operational excellence in line with its strategic direction, the four perspectives of the balanced scorecard initiatives and operational objectives both in the long and short term. It is a top down approach that drives the entire organization towards achieving the next level of excellence and ensures its competitiveness with regard to quality, cost, speed, dependability and flexibility in the industry.

Through the total involvement of employees in TPM, it has enabled the organization to mobilize the entire organizational resources towards meeting the organizational objectives.

Level of excellence achieved would be difficult to sustain unless the organization has a sound structure in place to maintain it. TPM provides organization with such a structure. That role is played by the Autonomous Maintenance Small Group Activities who form the backbone of the TPM organization. It should be noted that they are the biggest population in the origination and their contribution will have significant impact towards the organization. They will be the one who will be resuming that role of sustaining the gains made at each level of excellence in the operations. Simultaneously they too are playing an active role in the continuous improvement activities at their workplace.

Nurtures and Cultivate a Quality Culture

The strategic implementation of TPM alleviate the organization toward achieving a World-Class quality culture (Level 6) where the intellectual capability, creativity and innovativeness are used to the fullest potential and highly orientated towards the customer.

Common characteristics of a World-Class quality culture are:

• Total ownership of quality where the workforce on the shop floor not only operate the machine but has accountability of the overall performance of the equipment with respect to quality, cost, maintenance, cleanliness and safety
• The customer care-abouts is strongly embedded in the heart and minds of the employees. They relate their daily routine activities to quality, cost, speed, dependability and flexibility.
• The organization possesses a strong teaming culture. Teamwork is strengthened and it operates as a strong cross functional cohesive team using their tacit knowledge, creativity and innovativeness in making a better organization through continuous improvement.
• The employees and teams are highly motivated and empowered in executing their roles and responsibilities in supporting the strategic direction, strategic initiatives and operational objectives of the organization. TPM creates an favorable environment which organization to utilize their human potentials fully.