Page 83 - TPM A Route to World-Class Performance

64 TPM-A Route to World-Class Performance

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) combines the conventional practice of preventive
maintenance with the concept of total employee involvement. The result is an innovative
system for equipment maintenance that optimizes effectiveness, eliminates breakdowns and
promotes autonomous operator maintenance through day-to-day activities.
Specifically, TPM aims at:
1 Establishing a company structure that will maximize production system effectiveness.
2 Putting together a practical shopfloor system to prevent losses before they occur, throughout
the entire production system’s life cycle, with a view to achieving zero accidents, zero
defects and zero breakdowns.
3 Involving all departments, including production, development, sales and management.
4 Involving every single employee, from top management to front-line workers.
5 Achieving zero losses through small-group activities.
I
Figure 4.3 What is TPM? The JIPM de$nition

The scope for improving on the way we do things now can only be
established by adopting the continuous improvement approach and by never
accepting that what we are achieving today will be good enough for the
future. A striking example of this comes from a visit by the authors some
years ago to the press shop in a Toyota automobile plant in Japan, where it
was observed that a 1500-tonne press die change took place in the astonishingly
short time of 61/2 minutes. When this was commented on, the reply came:
’Yes, yes, we know, we need to reduce the time to 5 minutes.’ At that time, a
comparable change in a UK plant could take up to 4 hours. Straightforward
die change is regularly achieved in a single minute!
Analogies and visual aids are essential components in the process of
introducing TPM. One of these is the concept of healthy equipment, as already
illustrated in Figure 3.12, which portrays the ‘apple a day’ for good health,
the ’thermometer’ to monitor well-being and the ’injection’ to protect against
disease. Routine asset care involving lubricating, cleaning, adjusting and
inspecting ensures that the plant is protected against deterioration and that
small warning signs are acted upon. Condition monitoring and prediction of
impending trouble ensure that developing minor faults are never allowed to
deteriorate to a breakdown or a reduced level of machine effectiveness. Finally,
timely preventive maintenance safeguards against the losses which can come
from breakdowns or unplanned stoppages. These messages are most effective
when expressed in terms which hook into local and, hence, specific vision
and values.
A key benefit of TPM, and an important strength of Japanese management,
is the use of structured roles and responsibilities, which reduce both complexity
and uncertainty. In reality, there is only one TPM. It is a package of integrated
principles which are greater together than the sum of their individual parts.
As companies improve, TPM has been adapted so that it continues to represent
manufacturing’s best practice. The original five principles remain at the core
of the wider-reaching company-wide TPM discussed later in this chapter.