Maintenance portal

Welcome at Chris Hohmann's maintenance portal.
Created June 2003, this portal purpose is to provide user friendly links to my maintenance related resources.

TPM essentials for reader in a hurry

TPM was officially born in Japan, in 1971.
TPM is an evolution of former US maintenance known as PM (Productive Maintenance), method focusing improvement of machine yield through  proactive operator involvement.
The cradle of TPM was fierce competition already globalizing in automotive industry.
TPM spread across European industry in the early 80th, by the means of books and conclusions of Japanese carmakers benchmarking by their European counterparts.

In a context of mass production and fierce competition, everything you can produce will be sold and everything you cannot produce will be sold by competitors.
Produce more and better quality without additional investment is possible if fighting wastes. This is the leitmotiv of all Japanese methods, and relatively to machines management, it means seeking to maximize productive time, reduce non productive time due to stops and breakdown, keep optimum takt and reduce non-quality. These are the three levers of improvement through TPM; availability, performance and quality.

The meaning of Total Productive Maintenance is:

• Maintenance: maintain, keep in good operating condition = repair, clean, lubricate and grease, and accept to allocate all the necessary time.
• Productive: do the maintenance job while producing or at least minimizing the impact on production.
• Total: consider every aspects and involve everybody.

TPM is more than keeping machines in a good state,  TPM fosters improvement. Operator involvement is an opportunity to raise their know-how level and enrich their jobs with basic maintenance tasks. Operator do know well the machines, they are living intelligent sensors, able to detect abnormal situation by unusual noise, odor, color or vibrations...

The performance indicator used in TPM is the Overall Equipment Efficiency, OEE. OEE give a simple and synthetic, yet severe overview, taking into account all parameters decreasing machine yield. OEE is build on three "themes": availability, performance and quality.
the follow-up and analysis of OEE components indicates where to focus for improvement.

TPM is a  mature method who got even more interest with the end of mass production.
It is harder to pay-off and make profit with high cost equipment and small size, customized productions. These high-tech machines require more and more highly skilled personnel. Empowered small teams ask for more autonomy and job enrichment. As operators are key for overall shop performance, it is management duty to keep them motivated, skilled and autonomous.

The breakthrough and progress achieved with TPM, its apparent simplicity made this method popular.
BUT TPM deployment is not that simple! there are several pitfalls and as many other projects, TPM sometimes will not survive after the first public address and enthusiastic beginning.
Main pitfalls in TPM are bad targeting of first pilot machines, data collection and operator so deeply involved in TPM activities they'll forget to produce!

It is better to start TPM in a well targeted workshop, line or machine and extend it gradually to other areas.

New cross functional organizations give back to the work units and enrich individual task with what taylorism split and separated.

  Latest success with TPM demonstrate how meaningful it is to practice preventive maintenance and to give back the know-how to production teams.

The trend is to let Maintenance being more operational than functional.
For maintenance manager and his personnel the implications are important and manifold.
Read in detail (French only)

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