What is TPM?

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:

  1. Avoid wastage in a quickly changing economic environment.
  2. Producing goods without reducing product quality.
  3. Reduce cost.
  4. Produce a low batch quantity at the earliest possible time.
  5. Goods send to the customers must be non defective.

APC

APC focuses on three major components of TPM:

  1. Work Area Management
  2. Operator Equipment Management
  3. Focused on Equipment and Process Improvement

Work Area Management (WAM)

Work Area Management uses terms to commence formal improvement activities for a defined area of the workplace to ensure

"A place for everything, and everything in it's place"

This will lead the workplace to be:

  • Safer
  • More productive
  • Less frustrating

Employee will no longer waste time trying to find tools, information and materials. Once a workplace has reached an acceptable level of tidiness and orderliness, as verified by a formal audit process the teams are ready and prepared to move forward with Operator Equipment Management activities.

Operator Equipment Management (OEM)

Operator Equipment Management is training operators to

"care for equipment at the source"

This will ensure basic equipment conditions such as:

  • No Looseness
  • No Contamination and
  • Perfect Lubrication

This is achieved through training and standard operational procedures. OEM allows the implementation of a planned preventive and predictive maintence program to be administered by the maintenance department.

Focused on Equipment & Process Improvement (FE&PI)

The MACRO approach of focusing on two or more defined bottleneck areas to increase OEE by 5 - 15%.

How?

  • Form a cross functional team for each bottleneck area.
  • By systematically analysing equipment and process losses.
  • Each FE&PIteam should aim to complete their mandate of improvement in 12 weeks.

If more investigation is required, MICRO focused teams are organised.

MICRO focused teams follow on from MACRO FE&PI as a means to address the specific losses identified by the MACRO FE*PI Team. Equipment and Technical losses are addressed by this team in more detail.