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An Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)

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Tom Robertson

In today’s industrial scenario huge losses/wastage occur in the manufacturing shop floor. This waste is due to operators, maintenance personal, process, tooling problems and non-availability of components in time etc. Other forms of waste includes idle machines, idle manpower, break down machine, rejected parts etc are all examples of waste. The quality related waste are of significant importance as they matter the company in terms of time, material and the hard earned reputation of the company. There are also other invisible wastes like operating the machines below the rated speed, start up loss, break down of the machines and bottle necks in process. Zero oriented concepts such as zero tolerance for waste, defects, break down and zero accidents are becoming a pre-requisite in the manufacturing and assembly industry. In this situation, a revolutionary concept of TPM has been adopted in many industries across the world to address the above said problems.

What is Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)?
It can be considered as the medical science of machines. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance program, which involves a newly defined concept for maintaining plants and equipment. The goal of the TPM program is to markedly increase production while, at the same time, increasing employee morale and job satisfaction.
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.

Why TPM?

TPM was introduced to achieve the following objectives. The important ones are listed below.
• Avoid wastage in a quickly changing economic environment.
• Producing goods without reducing product quality.
• Reduce cost.
• Produce a low batch quantity at the earliest possible time.
• Goods send to the customers must be non-defective.

Similarities and differences between TQM and TPM:

The TPM program closely resembles the popular Total Quality Management (TQM) program. Many of the tools such as employee empowerment, benchmarking, documentation, etc. used in TQM are used to implement and optimize TPM. Following are the similarities between the two.

1. Total commitment to the program by upper level management is required in both
programmes
J. Venkatesh Monday, April 16, 2007 1
2. Employees must be empowered to initiate corrective action, and
3. A long-range outlook must be accepted as TPM may take a year or more to
implement and is an on-going process. Changes in employee mind-set toward their
job responsibilities must take place as well.

One Response so far.

  1. Unknown says:

    Thank you for this deep article in TPM topic . Greetings TPM Magazine

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