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TPM with Lean Manufacturing
By David Redding

Companies are struggling to reduce their manufacturing cost and stay competitive in today’s global market. Outsourcing jobs to off shore companies is commonly seen in today’s manufacturing environment. Many companies are being forced to embrace lean concepts in every area of manufacturing and other un-related areas. Companies are streamlining processes, rebuilding equipment, and training direct and indirect employees in order to decrease costs, increase productivity, and improve quality.

What is Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)? TPM is an improvement methodology which enables continuous and rapid improvement of processes with use of total employee involvement and employee empowerment. TPM creates a culture where operators take ownership of their equipment and become full team partners with Maintenance, Engineering, and Management.

TPM Objectives

• Increase Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).
  
  
• Provide training to upgrade maintenance and employee skills.
  
  
• Involve everyone in the organization and look for balanced skills to develop teams.
  
  
• Implement or improve existing planned maintenance systems.
  
  
• Ensure that present equipment and processes are completely reliable.
  
  
• Strive to become a world class manufacturing firm.
  
  
• Ensure that equipment is capable of reaching its designed capacity.
  
  
• Implement a preventative maintenance and predictive maintenance program for the entire life of equipment, and facilities.
  
  
• Gather support from all departments involved in the use of equipment and facilities.

Many companies are implementing lean practices in their plants and making tremendous progress in reducing non value added labor and cost. At the same time, non value added activities are eliminated, the flow through the plant is greatly increased and there is a significant boost in the level of quality. However, these reductions put additional pressure on process equipment.

In a system where there is excess inventory and many non-value added activities, the excesses tend to hide bottle necks or constraints to smooth production flow. As a result, as companies reduce inventory, they find that equipment, maintenance support, and response time can be bottlenecks to the normal production processes.

The problem of identification of bottlenecks resulting from maintenance issues is usually caused when a company does not track its OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness); or they only measure selected areas which will not give the true overall performance of the equipment or process. What happens is that, due to failure to identify the true cause of the bottleneck, many processes have been adjusted to accommodate the reduced capacity of the equipment. As an end result, the productivity of the entire operation is reduced.

Company maintenance labor costs continue to increase; consequently companies seek to reduce maintenance labor to minimums in order to reduce indirect labor costs. This action serves to create a vicious cycle where the company spends more money in all the excesses to retain a level of productivity that allows them to serve their customer or they suffer with continuing incremental reduction of productivity until an essential piece of equipment breaks down and excessive costs are required to get production back. An excellent cure for this syndrome is TPM (total productive maintenance).

Like lean management, TPM involves everyone that is associated with the equipment, from the maintenance personnel through the production operators to the supervisors and management. TPM programs have found that operators are the best monitors of equipment or processes because they are the ones who constantly use the equipment and know when it is not sounding or operating correctly.

In TPM operators can be used for routine maintenance functions such as cleaning, recording equipment data, and preventative maintenance. This will free up the skilled maintenance labor to ensure that equipment operates at its originally designed capacity. As a result of 5S Thinking, the areas around the equipment are kept clean and exposure to excess fluids, dust and dirt is minimized, thereby extending the life of critical machine components.

When 5S thinking is implemented as part of TPM, maintenance departments are required to perform 5S in all areas of maintenance such as equipment repair parts, records, storage cribs, and tools.

What is the 5S process?

• Organization: keep the necessary materials in work area, dispose or keep in a remote storage area less frequently used items and discard unneeded items.
  
  
• Arrangement: painting floors to visualize the outlining of work area and locations. Having the correct tools at the machine and at hand is a key step to TPM.
  
  
• Cleaning: clean all equipment and areas, cleaning is a type of inspection and is important in TPM.
  
  
• Standardization: Have easy to follow procedures and develop a structure to support them.
  
  
• Sustain: finally, to keep the first 4S alive is necessary to keep educating and maintaining standards and procedures.

Implementing 5S will greatly improve maintenance operations by reducing clutter, allowing maintenance to quickly locate parts and supplies, and improving response time for emergency repairs.

TPM enhances the justification for an effective maintenance department. Non-value added activities are eliminated and the goal of the maintenance department is better achieved. With TPM equipment shut downs are scheduled for preventative maintenance allowing greater utilization of equipment and boosting productivity. OEE which measures the two increases.

Total Productive Maintenance does not happen overnight, and developing the disciplines and training will require continuous improvement throughout a company’s existence.