Total Productive Maintenance

In a reactive maintenance culture, equipment failure sets the agenda. The schedule is planned and then re-planned around breakdowns. Maintenance is a queue of work orders. Operators run machines but do not own them — if something sounds wrong, it gets reported and life continues until it stops.

The cost of this is systematically understated, because the biggest component never appears on a report: lost capacity. A line down for three hours does not generate an invoice. It shows up as overtime later, expedited freight, a missed delivery, or capital spent on capacity you already own but cannot access.

Total Productive Maintenance changes the model. Equipment reliability becomes a shared responsibility between production and maintenance, prevention displaces reaction, and the losses become visible and measured.

TPM is built on eight pillars, on a foundation of 5S workplace organization:

• Autonomous maintenance — operators take on routine cleaning, inspection and lubrication of their own equipment. This is the cultural core: an operator who cleans a machine notices developing problems weeks before a breakdown.
• Planned maintenance — scheduled on equipment condition and failure data rather than on habit or convenience
• Quality maintenance — maintaining equipment to the condition required to hold the product specification, not merely to keep running
• Focused improvement (KAIZEN) — small cross-functional teams eliminating specific chronic losses
• Early equipment management — designing maintainability and reliability into new equipment before it is installed, when it is still cheap to influence
• Training and education — building the skills both pillars depend on
• Safety, health and environment — well-maintained equipment is safer equipment
• Administrative TPM — applying the same loss-elimination thinking to office and support processes

Most failed TPM programmes fail at the first pillar, and they fail for a predictable reason: autonomous maintenance is presented to operators as extra work rather than as ownership of their equipment. It requires genuine training, time allocated in the schedule, and maintenance letting go of tasks it has always owned.

TPM is measured through Overall Equipment Effectiveness, the product of three factors:

• Availability — is the equipment running when it should be?
• Performance — is it running at its designed rate?
• Quality — is what it produces good first time?

OEE is useful precisely because it is multiplicative and therefore unforgiving. Three respectable-looking factors of 90%, 90% and 95% produce an OEE of 77%. Organizations measuring OEE for the first time are routinely surprised — and the surprise is the point.

Underneath it sit the six big losses: breakdowns, setup and adjustment, idling and minor stoppages, reduced speed, process defects, and reduced yield at start-up. Minor stoppages are the ones consistently missed, because each is too small to report — and collectively they are frequently the largest loss in the plant.

Expect: higher availability and OEE, fewer unplanned stoppages, longer equipment life, lower maintenance cost over time, capacity released without capital spend, better safety, and operators who understand and own their equipment.

Where it goes wrong:

• Autonomous maintenance imposed as extra work without training, time or genuine handover of responsibility
• Maintenance refusing to release routine tasks, so operators are asked to own equipment they are not permitted to touch
• Measuring OEE and then not acting on what it reveals
• Ignoring minor stoppages because each individually looks trivial
• 5S run as housekeeping rather than as the foundation that makes deterioration visible
• Rolling out all eight pillars at once instead of establishing autonomous and planned maintenance first
• No early equipment management, so every new machine imports the same maintainability problems
• Treating TPM as a maintenance department initiative when it is a production and maintenance partnership

We bring 30+ years and 900+ organizations to this work, and we usually implement TPM as part of a broader improvement programme rather than in isolation — the equipment losses and the process losses are rarely independent.