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Total Productive Maintenance (Concepts and Benefits for a safer work environment.)

Preventative maintenance is a core feature of industrial fortitude.

Preventative maintenance is required in order to boost overall equipment effectiveness (or OEE). A commitment to OEE and the functions that create an atmosphere of safety and efficiency is crucial to jobsite security and employee safety. All of this falls under the umbrella of total productive maintenance (TPM): a mindset that ensures a safer work environment for everyone involved in the team’s processes and end goals.

Instituting a TPM program within your own firm is a simple adjustment that promises to reinvent the way you think of your routine maintenance, equipment reliability, and even manufacturing processes. TPM is, at its core, an institutional shift toward total ownership over the processes and utilities that your brand relies on for business success. It seeks to eliminate major losses by implementing autonomous maintenance on any high-value piece of equipment that machine operators at your firm can’t live without. By merging your entire team and bringing them onboard with the productive maintenance functions, streamlining team morale, and ensuring overall success as overarching goals, the processes that affect production losses and morale for the entire team begin to shrink.

TPM implementation seeks to apply basic steps and predictive maintenance to minimize the problem set faced by your business on a regular basis by reworking the way your maintenance department, and your entire team, thinks about the pillars of success.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) as a Core Functionality

All industries run into maintenance issues and minor breakdowns that can turn into significant downtime. If you aren’t proactive about finding and implementing solutions, these routine maintenance needs can create severe delays in the production cycle that runs your entire operation. With TPM as a core functionality of your brand, you can be sure that your overall productiveness factors in equipment defects, downtime, and necessary solution implementation for the best possible equipment reliability.

Maintenance activities are often overlooked in the chain of command in any industry. Production process considerations typically focus on efficiency and runtime statistics, but the need to constantly conduct life-extending inspection and maintenance tasks is lost in the bigger picture. Implementing a TPM program is the best way to alter your corporate mentality when it comes to the production process so that your brand can focus on a lean approach and boost reliability and perfect production techniques all at once.

TPM as a Pillar of Toyota’s Lean Processing

The pillars of TPM (and the end goal of TPM utilization) come from the lean process that grew out of the Toyota production lines in the 1950s. Lean learning and the TPM framework that is derived from it are focused on creating reliability at all levels of production. From maintenance staff to technical fabricators, everyone in the chain of production is empowered as a stakeholder through TPM program implementation and a lean manufacturing process.

One process that has grown out of this initial approach is the 5S methodology. These correspond to five outcomes (in Japanese) and have been translated as: “sort,” “set in order,” “shine,” standardize,” and “sustain.” Simply put, the 5S approach is the shining example of the TPM methodology. Each “S” represents a streamlining and safety procedure that boosts employee efficiency while also placing the onus of responsibility and ultimately the sense of pride that comes from a job well done onto each employee. The 5S work order ensures total quality management across all production and administrative functions of the company’s TPM implementation.

Maintenance and Production Process Safety with the TPM Program

Implementing the pillars of a great TPM process in your own daily basis of production is a surefire way to improve the efficiency and safety that goes into the processes of your business. Boosting safety is a great way to give back to the workforce that creates the growth within your industry sector and increase the output of your facility at the same time.

These features of lean manufacturing and equipment effectiveness go hand in hand. After all, a safe production process that utilizes best practices in quality maintenance and continuous improvement schedules is one that rolls out end products with zero defects and exacting quality standards at a high rate of return.

TPM is an essential framework for promoting great employee morale and the best way to ensure the stoppage of big losses and unacceptable failure rates within the safety and production process of your workplace. The goal of Total Productive Maintenance is simple: to make your workplace better.

Contact Incito Consulting Group

Learn more about Value Stream workshops and training courses when you contact us at 866-697-LEAN or send us a message online. You may want to take advantage of our Lean Six Sigma Consulting services or value stream mapping workshop, which will help you get the most out of all your processes.

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