What are 8 Pillars of Total Productive Maintenance?
What is Total Productive Maintenance?
Total productive maintenance is an effective process that helps maximise the equipment’s effectiveness through the active involvement of the staff and machinery itself. This means that rather than a dedicated maintenance team, everyone participates in the maintenance process, thus reducing breakdowns, accidents, and downtimes to a minimum.
This also focuses on training and encouraging the workers to take responsibility for the equipment to enhance the performance of the production process.
Below are its fundamental aspects:
Eliminating anything that is not required in the work area.
Organise the workplace.
Keep the place clean.
Set policies and standards to achieve the targets.
Ensure the implementation of the standards.
Benefits of the Total Productive Maintenance
Total productive maintenance yields many benefits, making it a preferred mode of maintenance. Its benefits include the following:
Minimum breakdowns increase the production capacity.
It lowers the maintenance cost, saving you a lot of money.
Fewer problems result in low waste production and high quality.
It can significantly decrease the number of accidents
Productive maintenance saves a lot of time compared to breakdown handling.
8 Fundamental Pillars of Total Productive Maintenance
Autonomous Maintenance
Autonomous maintenance means that your machine operators are fully trained and capable of executing routine maintenance on their equipment. This includes routine inspection, lubrication, cleaning and other tasks.
This gives them a feeling of responsibility and ownership and also helps them know their machine better. Autonomous maintenance also ensures that the machine is cleaned and properly lubricated all the time, virtually guaranteeing optimal performance and longer life.
However, this demands thorough training of the workers. Once they are trained, they will design their own maintenance schedule based on the machine’s needs. You can also implement a standard maintenance schedule.
Focused Improvement
Focused improvement follows a Japanese principal known as Kaizen. It revolves around continuously improving the process and its efficiency. This involves breaking the team into smaller groups that can work together and brainstorm ideas to make the process more efficient. This results in constant improvement in equipment’s performance.
Focused improvement also reduces defects in the production process and the product itself by continuously making risk assessments for every step.
Planned Maintenance
Planned Maintenance studies the failure rates, previous downtimes and other metrics to schedule the maintenance tasks. Its key focus is to execute maintenance on the equipment before predicted failure happens. This also allows you to plan the maintenance of the machine when it is in an idle state or running at a low capacity.
Moreover, this will also help you prepare a maintenance schedule for the whole inventory, giving you a precise time when you can carry out maintenance tasks on the machine without decreasing production significantly.
Quality Maintenance
It is of great importance to maintain and improve the quality of the maintenance if you want to reap the benefits of TPM. Quality maintenance focuses on the timely detection of work design errors and preventing them from progressing further. It emphasises detecting the root cause of the problem and eliminating it to prevent its recurrence.
Quality maintenance also improves the reliability of the process and deploys permanent countermeasures to production errors that can compromise the quality of the products.
Early Equipment Management
This pillar of total productive maintenance involves accumulating all the practical knowledge on the equipment from those who use it regularly and designing better and improved equipment. This helps suppliers to eradicate any design flaws and create more user-friendly and effective equipment.
Moreover, early equipment management also focuses on improving the maintenance process, ease of operation and accessibility of spare parts. This will further improve the production process and reduce the maintenance times.
Training and Education
Implementing a TPM strategy without giving proper knowledge and training to managers, staff and maintenance team can prove to be counterproductive. That is why it is important to fill any knowledge gaps in the team to ensure they can proactively monitor the equipment and detect any potential faults at the earliest stage.
This will also allow the maintenance team to set up a preventive maintenance schedule and keep the staff well-versed in the set principles of total productive maintenance.
Safety, Health and Environment
It is important to create a safe environment for the workers and employees to ensure their optimal performance. It involves eliminating any death or injury risks. To achieve this, you must introduce TPM solutions that take the safety and health of the workers into account.
We all know that if a worker feels safe in an environment, it will exude a positive attitude and perform at a higher efficiency. This will ultimately increase the overall productivity of the process.
TPM in Administration
A total productive management plan also addresses administrative functions and improves processes like procurement, production, scheduling, and logistics. Administrative TPM involves streamlining the processes and reducing waste production during these processes.
This helps optimise the supply chain and eliminate any errors in the process, resulting in a timely supply of raw materials and minimising downtime. It also addresses the timely procurement of spare parts.
How to Implement a Total Productive Management Strategy?
There are a few steps that can help you implement a TPM strategy at your production plant.
Step 1: Select a Pilot Area
It is feasible to select a smaller area to begin the implementation of the TPM model. This will allow you to monitor the outcome and make improvements in the process.
Step 2: Restore Optimum Operating Conditions
Create optimum conditions for the equipment and train your staff to maintain these conditions. This includes organising, cleaning and sustaining the conditions.
Step 3: Measure the OEE
Track the OEE using manual or automated techniques regularly. It will give you an idea of the effectiveness of your TPM program and make necessary improvements to it.
Step 4: Address Major Losses
Once you have collected the data on your TPM program, you can optimise the areas where your production process is lagging or making losses.
Step 5: Integrate Planned Maintenance
As the final step, implement proactive maintenance in your program to eliminate unforeseen downtimes in your production plant.
Some Common Challenges in Implementing TPM
While implementing total productive maintenance at your plant, you may face some challenges, which can include:
Resistance to Change: You may face some resistance from the workers and employees when adapting to the new ways.
Lack of a Lean Culture: Your organisation may not have a culture that can actively support lean practices.
Management Pressure: There may be some uncertainty among the employees due to management pressure to implement the new protocols.
Monitoring the Process: It can be challenging to implement the process and then actively monitor its performance.
Conclusion
Total productive maintenance is an effective strategy to keep your production plant in optimal working condition. It consists of 8 fundamental pillars that ensure a better and more efficient production process by minimising downtime due to faults and errors.
There is highly efficient CMMS software available in the market that can help you implement a TPM strategy at your plant. You can contact Rildov LLC to help you integrate CMMS at your production plant.