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What is total productive maintenance?
Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance management philosophy and strategy that maximizes production equipment effectiveness with the collective effort of all teams rather than just maintenance staff.
TPM engages employees at all levels — from floor plant technicians to senior facility managers — to boost production integrity, system quality, and achieve total perfection.
The ultimate aim is to minimize accidents, defects, mistakes, unscheduled breakdown maintenance, and downtime.
Total productive maintenance reframes traditional preventive maintenance as a value-added function and business advantage — let's understand how.
The philosophy behind total productive maintenance
As a lean manufacturing philosophy, TPM strives to achieve near-perfect production free from small stops, breakdowns, defects, and accidents. It does so by making equipment maintenance a shared responsibility of all employees.
As a result, when all workers are interested in keeping assets in tip-top shape, you can reduce cycle times and increase uptime.
TPM blurs the line between production and maintenance since everyone is involved in maintaining equipment. Companies adopting total productive maintenance zero in on preventive and predictive maintenance to improve the equipment's operational efficiency, lifespan, and productivity.
Now, let's dive deep into what you can achieve with total productive maintenance.
What are the goals for total productive maintenance?
Total productive maintenance has two primary goals: zero breakdowns and zero defects — both key to improving plant efficiency and minimizing inventory costs.
Numbers say so too! Total productive maintenance has historically improved plant capacity by more than 10% and productivity by 50%. It's also worth noting that more than half of all TPM implementations fail. Before planning small group activities for maintenance, you must understand the goals you're chasing.
You must meet the following five total productive maintenance goals to ensure good maintenance practices.
1. Enhance facility and equipment effectiveness by spotting downtime, defect, and speed losses on time.
2. Accomplish autonomous maintenance by empowering equipment operators to own maintenance tasks. Repair-level staff, for example, can follow O&M manuals to perform maintenance, whereas prevention-level staff can spot potential issues ahead of time. The improvement level staff can implement corrective maintenance measures for resolving recurring issues.
3. Develop a systematic maintenance approach to create condition-based maintenance standards and determine preventive maintenance requirements for each piece of equipment.
In TPM, maintenance staff plays a supporting role in training operators, diagnosing problems, and creating maintenance strategies. On the other hand, the operating staff own facilities and their care.
4. Facilitate appropriate and continuous training for all operations and maintenance staff. With adequate training, employees learn the necessary skills to do their jobs.
5. Move toward zero maintenance with maintenance prevention (MP), a practice focusing on equipment failure prevention and maintenance during the entire asset lifecycle. TPM's goal is to track and eliminate root causes of potential maintenance problems as early as possible.
Ultimately, the goal of TPM is to prevent:
- Downtime loss caused by breakdown or changeover times.
- Idle time and minor stoppages resulting from abnormal sensor operation, etc.
- Process defects occurring because of scarp and quality errors.
- Speed loss that prevents equipment from running at the desired speed.
- Yield loss during the time between machine start and stable production.
Seiichi Nakajima, a Japanese citizen, developed the total productive maintenance technique in 1971. This method combines preventive maintenance, quality management, reliability engineering, and operator-assisted maintenance (TPM).
Looking for a CMMS to simplify and streamline maintenance management?
What is the 5S foundation?
The 5S framework lays an iterable foundation for creating an organized and productive workspace. 5S of total productive maintenance are:
- Sort: Remove unnecessary workplace items by separating crucial equipment and tools from less important ones.
- Straighten: Use organization skills to ensure everything is at the right place at the right time.
- Shine: Keep the workspace, tools, and equipment clean with on-time inspections.
- Standardize: Create clear standards ad a framework to implement the above 3Ss.
- Sustain: Audit safety regulations for continuous improvement and long-term sustainment.
Companies generally combine the 5S framework with eight pillars of total productive maintenance to create a wholescale maintenance program.
What are the eight pillars of total productive maintenance?
The eight pillars of total productive maintenance improve equipment reliability with proactive and preventive measures.
1. Autonomous maintenance returns routine maintenance responsibility to operators. This equipment ownership means operators are responsible for cleaning, lubricating equipment, running facility condition assessments, and spotting emergent issues.
2. Planned maintenance minimizes unplanned stop time by scheduling maintenance tasks based on measured failure rates.
3. Quality maintenance uses root cause analysis to find and remove design errors in production.
4. Focused improvement encourages group work to achieve regular, incremental equipment operation improvements.
5. Early equipment management eases planned maintenance by involving employees in the pre-installation stage.
6. Training and education develop operator skills with regular training and coaching on TPM principles.
7. Safety, health, and environment create an accident-free workplace by eliminating potential health and safety risks.
8. TPM in administration improves administrative operations (order processing, procurement, and scheduling) by minimizing waste in administrative functions.
Check out the examples below to understand what TPM looks like in real life.
Examples of total productive maintenance by industry
Total productive maintenance ensures continuous process improvement by creating new routines for everyone across levels. For example,
- Machine operators are involved in document inspection, routing cleaning, replacing parts, lubrication, and greasing.
- Plant staff remove debris, unused assets, and waste.
- Facility technicians organize tools and equipment for ease of access.
- Management trains operators to improve their skills in identifying potential issues.
- Maintenance managers build maintenance checklists, work orders, and machine operation tasks.
So, what benefits can you expect with total productive maintenance? Keep reading.
Advantages of total productive maintenance
Total productive maintenance frames maintenance as a business advantage. As a result, you experience multiple benefits, including reduced unplanned downtime, maintenance costs, and risk of damage.
- Reduces unplanned downtime and maintenance: Scheduled, proactive maintenance activities help you minimize equipment failure and downtime.
- Improves workplace safety: The 5S framework helps you spot problems ahead of time, create an accident-free facility, and manage your workspace better.
- Minimizes manufacturing costs: Since TPM improves overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), you can better control equipment stoppage time and unplanned repairs. This decline in maintenance costs leads to higher profits.
- Boosts employee satisfaction: TPM ensures equipment longevity and improves employee happiness with cross-departmental knowledge sharing and equipment ownership.
- Minimizes defects: A consistent production line improves product quality and speed of delivery.
If that has piqued your interest, let's see how to calculate total productive maintenance and implement it at your facility.
How do you calculate total productive maintenance?
Total productive maintenance is best measured with OEE.
Availability means no stops. It considers availability loss events such as time losses due to equipment setup, adjustments, failure, and shift changes.
Performance considers all factors that prevent equipment from running at the maximum possible speed. Examples include minor interruptions, slow cycles, and small stops.
Quality ensures all manufactured items meet quality standards. It looks at factors such as production rejects and the reduced yield on startup.
TPM aims to achieve 100% OEE, which happens only when equipment run at full speed without interruptions and produce high-quality products.
What is OEE in total productive maintenance?
OEE in total productive maintenance is maintenance KPI. It reveals an asset's efficiency in terms of availability, performance, and production quality.
Maintenance managers use OEE to understand what percentage of planned production time is genuinely productive. 100% OEE means perfect production, and that's what TPM helps you achieve.
Steps to implement total productive maintenance
Ready to implement total productive maintenance? Check out these steps to get started.
- Step 1: Identify target equipment. This stage involves understanding which equipment is the easiest to improve, equipment with constraints, and other problematic assets. Prioritize the target assets depending on your maintenance strategy.
- Step 2: Clean up and prep equipment for improving operations. Leverage the 5S framework and autonomous maintenance to build a consensus between operators and maintenance staff.
- Step 3: Keep measuring OEE. Use a total productive maintenance checklist to bring OEE closer to 100%. You can also rely on total productive maintenance software to track unplanned stop times and make necessary adjustments.
- Step 4: Fix losses. Once you review OEE data, you can address challenges impacting productivity improvements.
- Step 5: Leverage proactive maintenance. Spot the assets that wear, fail frequently, and are under stress. This knowledge will help you optimize maintenance intervals and proactive maintenance programs.
Tips to sustain TPM efficiency as you scale
Sustaining TPM efficiency can be challenging. That's why you need to focus on both short-term and long-term maintenance tasks. Check out these tips to stay on top of total productive maintenance efficiency.
- Motivate employees with a shared vision of the future and the path to achieving that. For example, you can introduce a 5S award for the most significant OEE improvements.
- Build momentum for initiatives early on to ensure every initiative succeeds in the long run.
- Reiterate the importance of TPM to prevent employees from turning to old ways of working.
- Focus on continuous improvement so that the OEE score improves over time.
Achieving high OEE is easier with facility maintenance management software like Facilio. It brings together machinery and maintenance data for managing, monitoring, and controlling maintenance activities.
