Page 12 - TPM A Route to World-Class Performance

Preface

Customers expect manufacturers to provide excellent quality, reliable delivery
and competitive pricing. This demands that the manufacturer’s machines
and processes are highly reliable. But what does the term ’highly reliable’
really mean?
Certainly, with manufacturing, process and service industries becoming
progressively dependent on the reliability of fewer but more sophisticated
machines and processes, it means that poor equipment operating performance
is no longer affordable or acceptable. The overall effectiveness of our machines,
equipment and processes is paramount to provide consistency of product
quality and supply at a realistic price.
Coping with modern manufacturing technology that is intrinsic in the
materials, mechanisms and processes which we invent, design and use is one
issue. Delivering the manufacturing company’s vision and values as a lean,
just-in-time producer to its customers, shareholders and employees is another.
Some world-class Japanese companies recognized over twenty-five years
ago that the effective application of modern technology can only be achieved
through people - starting with the operators and maintainers of that technology
- and not through systems alone. Hence the emergence of total, productive
maintenance as the enabling tool to maximize the effectiveness of our equipment
by setting and maintaining the optimum relationship between people and
their machines.
The problem with the words ’Total Productive Maintenance’ - and hence
the philosophy or technique of TPM - is that, to Western ears, they sound as
though TPM is a maintenance function or a maintenance department initiative.
But it is not! On the contrary, TPM is driven by manufacturing which picks
up production and maintenance as equal partners: it is no longer appropriate
to say ’I operate, you fix’ and ’I add value, you cost money’. What TPM
promotes is: ’We are both responsible for this machine, process or equipment
and, between us, we will determine the best way to operate, maintain and
support it’. Perhaps a better way of describing TPM, therefore, is to think of
it as Total Productive Manufacturing, as it picks up operations and maintenance
as equal partners under the umbrella of manufacturing.
The problem of definition has arisen because the word ’maintenance’ has
a much more comprehensive meaning in Japan than in the Western world. If
you ask someone from a typical Western manufacturing company to define
the word ’maintenance’, at best he might say, ‘Carry out planned servicing at
fixed intervals’; at worst he might say, ’Fix it when it breaks down’. If you ask
a Japanese person from a world-class manufacturing company, he will probably
say, ’Maintenance means maintaining and improving the integrity of our
production and quality systems through the machines, processes, equipment
and people who add value to our products and services, that is, the operators