Total Productive Maintenance

Total Productive Maintenance:

1.       Balanced and standardized work often leads to implementing total productive maintenance (TPM), which aims to predict failures and to fix them before theycause machine failures and downtime.

2.       The goal of TPM is to maximize theoverall equipment effectiveness by reducing equipment downtime whileimproving quality and capacity. This results in minimizing losses caused bybreakdowns, defects, and accidents.

3.       Thus, TPM is a process to maximize theproductivity of a piece of equipment for its entire life cycle.

4.       On top of that, TPM fosters an environment for encouraging improvements in machine reliability and safety through the participation of all employees.

5.       With such an environment, TPM improves teamwork between machine operators and maintenance crew, improves safety, increases employee knowledge in machine-related processes, and creates a more involved and creative workforce.

6.       In a lean environment, TPM attempts to minimize common equipment related wastes, including:

a)      Setup and calibration

b)      Breakdowns and failures (short and catastrophic)

c)       Starving (idling) and blockage (stoppage)

d)      Reduced speed (low performance)

e)      Startup (warm-up)

f)       Defects (scrap, rework, rejects)

7.       Properly implemented TPM also eliminates many machine-related bottlenecks through the following:

a)      Improved machine reliability

b)      Extended machine life

c)       Increased capacity without purchasing additional resources

 

Quality at the Source:

1.       In-process quality control or quality at the source means that employees are trained to make sure that the products they are sending to the next workstation are defect-free.

2.       This is essential to successful JIT/pull production systems, where only the items needed are produced, without overproduction to compensate for defective items.

3.       Defective units also contribute to increased variability in production rates and inventory levels. This undesirable result is often the focus of six-sigma projects and lean techniques.

4.       Finally, passing defective items downstream may result in shipping incomplete or nonconforming orders to customers, which will affect customer satisfaction directly and may lead to paying costly penalties or to sales cancellations.

5.       End-of-line (pre delivery) quality checks and statistical process controls are often costly and overwhelming since they tackle many sources of defects in many product types. This also makes it difficult to pinpoint the causes of quality problems. Rejected items at the end of the line are either scrapped or reworked. Scrapped units add to waste and cost in a lean context, and reworked items result in backtracking and flow complications and increased non-value-added activities such as material handling, re sequencing, and rescheduling.