An Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)

What is Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)?
It can be considered as the medical science of machines. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance program which involves a newly defined concept for maintaining plants and equipment. The goal of the TPM program is to markedly increase production while, at the same time, increasing employee morale and job satisfaction.

TPM brings maintenance into focus as a necessary and vitally important part of the business. It is no longer regarded as a non-profit activity. Down time for maintenance is scheduled as a part of the manufacturing day and, in some cases, as an integral part of the manufacturing process. The goal is to hold emergency and unscheduled maintenance to a minimum.


Why Total Productive Maintenance?
TPM was introduced to achieve the following objectives. The important ones are listed below.

• Avoid wastage in a quickly changing economic environment.
• Producing goods without reducing product quality.
• Reduce cost.
• Produce a low batch quantity at the earliest possible time.
• Goods send to the customers must be non defective.

Similarities and differences between Total Quality Management (TQM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM):
The TPM program closely resembles the popular Total Quality Management (TQM) program. Many of the tools such as employee empowerment, benchmarking, documentation, etc. used in TQM are used to implement and optimize TPM.Following are the similarities between the two.

1. Total commitment to the program by upper level management is required in both programmes
2. Employees must be empowered to initiate corrective action, and
3. A long range outlook must be accepted as TPM may take a year or more to implement and is an on-going process. Changes in employee mind-set toward their job responsibilities must take place as well.

The differences between TQM and TPM is summarized below.

TQM
Object: Quality ( Output and effects )
Mains of attaining goal: Systematize the management. It is software oriented
Target: Quality for PPM

TPM
Object: Equipment ( Input and cause )
Mains of attaining goal: Employees participation and it is hardware oriented
Target: Elimination of losses and wastes.

Source: plant-maintenance.com | Venkatesh J