to being blind to the waste.
The maintenance department becomes an advisory group to help with training, setting standards, doing major repairs, troubleshooting, and consulting on maintenance improvement ideas. Maintenance departments are the specialists in major maintenance, major problems, problems that span several work areas, and trainers. Under TPM, maintenance becomes very closely aligned with production. For TPM to work, maintenance knowledge must be disseminated throughout the production hierarchy.
The old philosophy of “Produce at all costs, damn the torpedoes — full speed ahead!” will fall flat on its face with TPM. TPM needs some downtime in order to be successful. The operators must have complete, top level support throughout all phases of the transition and thereafter.
Good maintenance practices, as highlighted by the article in Exhibit 1-2 on the following page, can contribute to the productive output and profit of the whole organization. It contributes to safety too.
TPM is revolutionary. It is a game changer on factory floors of organizations that can go all the way to autonomous maintenance. The ideas of TPM are to make the operator a senior partner in the production effort. These ideas, imported from Japan, have taken root in factories, refineries, mills, and power plants throughout North America. They succeed because they force us to realize we have to use more and more of the capabilities of every employee (and vendors too!) to remain competitive. Operators are traditionally viewed as underutilized in most factories.
Exhibit 1-2
The machine operator is the key player in a TPM environment. Many of the losses are under the control of the operator, involve the operator, or happen while the operator is near the machine. There is less reliance on the maintenance department for basic maintenance (but more for maintenance prevention projects, productivity improvement projects, coaching, training, problem solving, and mentoring). Control and responsibility are passed to the operators.
Although the operator is the key player, it’s the management that ultimately has to make the right choices. Keith Rimmer, a consultant from the global consultancy Woodhouse Partnership, says convincingly that for a company to be successful in Asset Management, “It requires processes that are driven effectively by top management and supported by empowered and competent employees. A key characteristic of successful asset management is consistently making sound decisions and good compromises, and carrying out the appropriate tasks at the right time and at the optimum level of expenditure. Above all it requires the commitment of top management, and it is unlikely that an organization will successfully integrate and optimize their asset management without such commitment.”
One interesting side effect was the application of TPM principles to complex process environments such as power plants, sewer treatment and water plants, and chemical plants. The operator of a sewer treatment plant is a very different person than the operator of a machine. The sewer plant operator has studied for and obtained a license. These positions generally require personnel with higher qualifications than do machine operator positions. Some of the same ideas can be applied, but the tasking has to be reviewed by personnel knowledgeable about both plant operation and maintenance. In a later section we will review the reason TPM was developed in automobile assembly plants and not in other business types.
Legitimate Fear
In today’s cut-happy environment, any change is viewed through the lens of job loss. TPM is no exception. When Paul Wilson, Managing Director of Aster Training, installed a TPM system, his team had to face fear from the maintenance ranks. He said, “We worked hard at alleviating any fear the maintenance technicians might have had that their jobs were under threat. This soon evaporated once we were challenging them with more interesting projects.” Much of the work being taken over by operations is not being done at all (like basic maintenance activity). Maintenance departments will find themselves with ample work on just the projects requested by the TPM teams. These projects will generally reduce waste, make the machinery operate better, or achieve lower levels of product variation. The result is better profit without personnel cuts (for the same volume). Of course significant cuts in volume will require retrenchment, but that is another conversation and should not be mixed up with a TPM implementation.
One of the leading thinkers in TPM is J. Venkatesh. His review of the history of TPM can be found in an article on Reliabilityweb.com. TPM is an innovative Japanese concept. The origin of TPM can be traced back to 1951 when preventive maintenance was introduced in Japan.
W.E Deming traveled to Japan under the Marshall Plan and began a powerful and eventually world-changing discussion about quality. The royalty of what was left of Japanese industry were in the training rooms. They saw that the drive for quality and efficient production was their only edge. They had no resources beyond what they could build and imagine.
The ideas of TQM (Total Quality Management) and the concepts of PM were only partial answers to the issues of maintenance and quality. After much trial and error, the PM effort evolved into TPM.
The concept of preventive maintenance was taken from American industrial practices. Nippondenso* of the Toyota group was the first company to introduce plant-wide preventive maintenance in 1960. Preventive maintenance is the concept where operators produced goods using machines, while the maintenance group was dedicated to maintaining those machines. However, with the automation of Nippondenso, maintenance became a problem as more maintenance personnel were required. So the management decided that the routine maintenance of equipment would be carried out by the operators. (This is the beginning of Autonomous Maintenance, one of the features of TPM). The maintenance group took up only the essential maintenance works.
Thus, Nippondenso, which already followed preventive maintenance, also added autonomous maintenance done by production operators. The maintenance crew was released of their routine maintenance tasks; instead, they carried out equipment modification for improving reliability and maintainability. The modifications were made or incorporated in all their new equipment. These tasks are aimed at maintenance prevention (MP). MP or Maintenance Prevention is the elimination or reduction in the need for maintenance. By reducing the source of the dirt, we also reduce the need for cleaning (an example of Maintenance Prevention). Thus, preventive maintenance along with maintenance prevention and Maintainability Improvement gave birth to Productive Maintenance (PM). The aim of productive maintenance was to maximize plant and equipment effectiveness to achieve optimum life cycle cost of production equipment.
By then, Nippondenso was using quality circles, involving the employee’s participation. All employees took part in implementing productive maintenance. Based on these developments, Nippondenso was awarded the Distinguished Plant prize by the Japanese Institute of Plant Engineers (JIPE) for developing and implementing TPM. Nippondenso became the first company to obtain the TPM certification.
TPM had become a part of TPS (Toyota Production System). According to Bob Williamson, a long-time veteran of the TPM wars, the TPS systematically focuses on the identification and elimination of waste to reduce manufacturing costs. In Japanese plants of that era, the culture was ripe for involvement of everyone in the production process.
In many ways TPM is a return to a pre-1920s model of maintenance. Before the 1920s, machine operators were skilled mechanics, so they were expected to repair their own machines. As mass production
