Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a strategy that operates according to the idea that everyone in a facility should participate in maintenance, rather than just the maintenance team. This approach uses the skills of all employees and seeks to incorporate maintenance into the everyday performance of a facility.
Management should be involved in TPM by promoting it as a corporate policy. Reliability engineers also need to be involved, as they can interpret the maintenance data stored in an organization’s
CMMS in order to find relevant metrics and generate business insights.
Since the goal of total productive maintenance is to improve productivity by reducing downtime, implementing a TPM program can greatly impact your overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) over time. To do this, preventive maintenance should always be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. For example, running machines with the mindset of “we’ll fix it when it breaks” is not an option with total productive maintenance. A TPM program helps get rid of this mindset and turns it into one of putting machinery at the core focus of an operation and maximizing its availability.
Improving OEE through TPM is often done by forming small, multidisciplinary teams to address core areas such as preventive and autonomous maintenance, training employees who operate machinery, and the security and standardization of work processes. Total productive maintenance focuses on the efficient and effective use of the means of production, meaning all departments should be involved. These small teams work together to increase productivity and decrease downtime through equipment reliability.
Going from reactive to predictive maintenance is one of the biggest advantages of implementing a TPM program. Reactive maintenance or “firefighting” is costly, as you’re not only footing the bill for machinery repairs but also dealing with the cost of unplanned downtime. Let’s take a look at some of the direct and indirect benefits that result from total productive maintenance.
