Competition in industry today is at an all-time high. Manufacturers across the globe as well as local ones are constantly looking for ways to be competitive. Therefore, they dedicate a good amount of effort in increasing productivity, improving efficiency and enhancing safety in their production facilities. What then can local manufacturers do to speed up the process of enhancing their operations?
One of the ways local manufactures can enhance their operations is by having an excellent maintenance program for their production lines. Total productive maintenance (TPM) has over the years proven to be an excellent maintenance program for manufacturers. As defined by The Plant Maintenance Resource Centre in a publication published in 2005, 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 increases productivity, efficiency, and safety by empowering operators, team leaders and managers to all play a proactive role in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of their own work areas through 8 pillars of activities.
The first pillar, which is Autonomous Maintenance, encourages manufacturers to place the responsibility of basic maintenance activities in the hands of operators and leave the maintenance staff with more time to attend to more complex maintenance tasks. Dedicated maintenance personnel can focus their full attention on broken down equipment and more pressing maintenance issues in the workplace. thereby increasing their productivity and efficiency.
Process and Machine Improvement represents the second pillar. Here, team leaders collect information from operators and work areas on the failure rates and breakdowns then prioritize preventative maintenance and improvements.
Under the third pillar, Planned Maintenance, maintenance personnel are advised to schedule maintenance activities based on observed behaviour of machines such as failure rates and breakdowns. This improves the performance of machines and reduces the risk of unnecessary breakdowns.
The fourth pillar being, Early Management of New Equipment, uses the experience gathered from previous maintenance improvement activities to ensure that new machinery reaches its optimal performance much early than usual.
Quality Maintenance, the fifth pillar, focuses on working design error detection and prevention into the production process. Implemented by both machine operators and maintenance personnel. Spreading TPM principles to administrative functions is achieved through pillar six – Administrative Work. The pillar helps the concept of TPM to be understood wholesomely within an organization and ensures that support functions understand the benefits of maintenance improvements and are therefore on board.
Education and Training to all members of staff remains the seventh pillar and is concerned with filling the knowledge gap that may exist in an organization when it comes to total productive maintenance.
The last pillar of Safety and Sustained Success. This pillar of total productive maintenance ensures that all workers are provided with an environment that is safe and that all conditions that are harmful to their well-being are eliminated.
How then can the TPM Pillars be implemented? In order to ensure successful implementation of the TPM pillars, firstly, efficiency and safety goals have to be clearly defined. This can be done by means of establishing key performance indicators (KPIs).
Secondly, companies need to pilot the program. Manufacturers may concentrate on a piece of equipment that is easy to upgrade or a production area that has been shown to be problematic and requires immediate attention.
Before commencing the pilot, the third step would be to conduct training. With both goals and scope defined, employees need to be actively involved in the process. Since TPM aims to actively involve all employees in the process, this entails having the relevant knowledge and skills to carry it out.
In a fourth step, the experience can be gathered over a fixed period of time often 4-6 weeks, which can be directly incorporated into the process in the sense of continuous improvement. Finally, TPM can be rolled out and implemented in the entire production facility if the pilot project was able to achieve the desired goals
According to a research paper by Yash Dave titled Potential Benefits of TPM Implementation published in 2013, the potential benefits of successful TPM implementation in any organization or industry leads to improved productivity by reducing all major losses in the plant. Improved quality by reducing all types of defects and malfunctions. Since the TPM focuses on the optimum utilization of the resources, then it leads to reduction in cost which is a paramount benefit for any company,
Other potential benefits include, improved working conditions and environment in the industry and leads to increased reliability. TPM also creates a world class manufacturing infrastructure in any industry and leading to high quality, prompt delivery which ultimately increases customer satisfaction.
Implementation of total productive maintenance in any industry requires a dedicated team to implement the concept systematically. With the fierce competition in industry today, implementing a TPM program may prove to be the only thing that stands between gaining that long lasting competitive edge or being left lagging behind.
