8 Pillars of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Explained

What Is Total Productive Maintenance?

Imagine a scenario in which every employee at your facility — including machine operators, field technicians and other personnel — aided maintenance teams by participating in routine care for all of your onsite equipment.

This all-hands proactive maintenance approach may sound idealistic, but it’s an increasingly popular strategy known as total productive maintenance, or TPM — and businesses are already using this framework to maximize equipment performance and improve maintenance outcomes.

TPM is a holistic approach to maintenance that trains machine operators and other personnel to take care of the machines and other equipment they use. By turning maintenance into a team effort that enlists help from all onsite staff, instead of only your maintenance personnel, TPM empowers facilities to strive for perfect production across the lifetime of an asset by preventing breakdowns, stoppages, defects or accidents from taking place.

Areas That Benefit From TPM

Lost productivity has a direct impact on the revenue generated from manufacturing operations. Preventing these losses is crucial not only to ensure facility safety and control equipment expenses but also to support smooth operations.

One of the primary goals of total productive maintenance is to minimize, if not fully eliminate, these productivity losses from occurring. Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) losses typically fall into one of six categories:

• Unexpected breakdowns: This includes equipment failures, unplanned maintenance and equipment repairs that disrupt operations without warning.
• Setup and transitions: Equipment and tool set-up times, transition processes, equipment adjustments and resource shortages all result in lost equipment availability.
• Short-term equipment stoppages: This includes small disruptions — such as sensor blockages, mechanical jams and dirty components — which can be resolved without maintenance staff and typically halt operations for five minutes or less.
• Reduced operation speed: Equipment wear and tear, misaligned components and incorrect machinery settings can all reduce the speed at which each asset is able to operate.
• Production quality issues: When manufactured items possess defects or otherwise fail to meet quality assurance standards, they must be repaired and scrapped, resulting in material waste and production loss for your facility.
• Equipment value: A lack of preventive maintenance increases the damage suffered by your assets, degrading their performance and longevity.

5S Foundation of Total Productive Maintenance

The first step in implementing a TPM strategy is to set down a foundation that helps your facility create a work environment that fosters organization, productivity and sustainable support for a quality maintenance program. This foundation, known as the 5S framework, was first developed by a Japanese pioneer of TPM systems.

The 5S foundation is named after the five Japanese words that outline the requirements of this framework:

• Sort (seiri): Any items that are not essential to the workspace should be removed.
• Straighten (seiton): Once non-essential items are removed from the workspace, the remaining essential items should be organized.
• Shine (seiso): The decluttered workspace should be cleaned and inspected by maintenance managers.
• Standardize (seiketsu): Maintenance leaders should develop and document standards for completing the sort-straighten-shine processes, including timelines for how often these tasks should be completed.
• Sustain (shitsuke): Once these processes have been established, management should provide ongoing oversight to make sure standards continue to be met.

One benefit in implementing the 5S foundation is that its requirements are intuitive and don’t require any technical skill. This makes it easy for any employee to support the goals of this framework. A clean, well-managed, productive space then makes it easier to implement an effective TPM program.

8 Pillars of TPM

A total productive maintenance system improves equipment reliability, availability and longevity by encouraging proactive, preventive maintenance techniques that are supported by your entire workforce.

These maintenance activities are categorized into eight distinct pillars supporting your TPM program:

1. Autonomous Maintenance

Certain maintenance tasks can be performed without the specialized skillsets of a maintenance professional. Autonomous maintenance empowers machine operators to take ownership over their equipment and perform this routine maintenance on their own, resulting in better equipment care and less unplanned downtime.

2. Focused Improvement (Kaizen)

Collaborative teams of cross-functional personnel work together to identify and implement strategic upgrades to equipment operation practices. By bringing together perspectives from multiple disciplines, these teams offer diverse inputs to continue identifying opportunities for continuous improvement.

3. Planned Maintenance

Instead of waiting for equipment to slow down or suffer damage, planned maintenance schedules maintenance work at optimal times for the improved performance of the machinery. This maintenance can also be scheduled at periods of low activity or when the equipment is not in use, preventing productivity loss.

4. Quality Management

Address product defects and other quality-related causes of productivity loss by identifying and eliminating the root cause of those defects. Quality management uses root cause analysis methods to reduce the number of defects that appear in production processes, and to identify and address any defects that do develop.

5. Early Equipment Management

As your TPM system’s knowledge base of equipment maintenance grows, this collective expertise can foster better equipment management practices in the early stages of an asset’s lifespan. Machine operators and other personnel can be onboarded to new equipment faster, resulting in better and more streamlined early-stage maintenance.

6. Training & Education

Continued training and education helps address knowledge gaps among all stakeholders involved in the equipment maintenance process. This ongoing education increases the ability of operators and other personnel to perform autonomous maintenance, support focused improvement and facilitate early equipment management as their skills and expertise increase over time.

7. Safety, Health & Environment

A clean, safe work environment reduces the risk of work-related accidents and other health hazards. TPM supports the ultimate goal of creating an accident-free workplace where safety issues never disrupt the flow of operations.

8. TPM in Administration

TPM’s holistic approach to equipment maintenance creates new efficiencies and capabilities for site administrators. More controlled, efficient and active work operations makes it easier to schedule work orders, forecast revenue generation and expenses, and execute order processing, procurement and other tasks supporting the manufacturing floor.

Benefits of Total Productive Maintenance

A properly implemented TPM system delivers a range of business outcomes that support greater productivity, efficiency and revenue potential. The operational impact of total productive maintenance include the following:

• Decreased breakdowns and production delays: Proactive maintenance reduces the frequency of equipment failures and unplanned outages for your machinery. Greater equipment uptime decreases the loss created by production delays and work stoppages.
• Reduced operational and maintenance costs: Preventing a repair is always less costly — in terms of material expense and productivity loss — than responding to an equipment failure. TPM enables equipment efficiencies that can reduce the total cost of ownership for your assets.
• Better overall asset performance: Equipment not only suffers fewer failures, but it’s able to operate with greater speed, efficiency and longevity.
• Work is standardized to industry best practices: In addition to potentially supporting regulatory compliance, TPM brings your manufacturing operations in line with the leading best practices for sustainability, safety and efficiency.
• Safer equipment: Your employees are less exposed to potential hazards, preserving their health while reducing the risk of accidents that could force a work stoppage.

Disadvantages of TPM

While businesses can realize significant benefits by implementing a TPM system, this approach isn’t a foolproof method for addressing productivity loss — especially when its implementation isn’t supported with appropriate resourcing and stakeholder buy-in.

The disadvantages of total productive maintenance can include:

• The need to create a detailed plan with clear goals and milestones: Developing this long-term strategy and checklists can be difficult, especially when stakeholders have different views on what those goals should be. Implementing TPM requires a significant commitment to shifting the organization’s goals around maintenance.
• Everyone in the organization must buy into this approach: If operators and other key personnel aren’t committing to supporting TPM, this system has a high risk of failure.
• Upfront costs for employee training and maintenance might be required: While TPM implementation is largely achieved through strategic and administrative changes, some resourcing will be required to set up employees for success in their roles.

Learning from Toyota’s Example as a TPM Pioneer

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Seiichi Nakajima at Nippon Denso (now Denso), an auto parts manufacturer in Japan, Toyota became one of the leading global brands embracing total productive maintenance to improve the quality and cost efficiency of its auto manufacturing processes.

Toyota prioritized proper training for all of its manufacturing workers as it implemented TPM into its manufacturing processes. The company then used the TPM methodology to support lean manufacturing processes that experienced minimal disruptions and stoppages. This brought stability to manufacturing processes that were designed for maximum cost-efficiency and quality assurance.

Today, TPM remains a core element of Toyota’s manufacturing processes, and it has helped inform the company’s mission of creating “good products at affordable prices.”

How a CMMS Can Assist With TPM

For organizations looking to implement a total productive maintenance strategy, a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can serve as a core software solution supporting TPM administration and the overall success of this approach.

A CMMS can support sustained TPM success through the following:

• Automated scheduling for preventive maintenance tasks
• Administrative support for creating work orders and managing TPM processes
• Task management related to the 5S framework and eight pillars of TPM

If you’re ready to optimize your preventive maintenance operations, it’s time to find out how Coast’s CMSS can help. Sign up for a free account today to learn more.