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How does TPM relate to Lean Manufacturing? Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is really about applying Lean Manufacturing to the way we care for our equipment. TPM is an important part of our Lean Manufacturing initiative, because without it we will experience difficulty as we improve the flow of materials through the introduction of pull systems and the elimination of waste between the steps in our process.

Fundamentally, TPM is about applying flow, takt, standard work and pull systems to the way we maintain and care for our equipment. It is a culture change in the way people care for equipment that is much more than marking, labeling, cleaning machines, or operators doing maintenance work. Total Productive Maintenance is an equipment and process improvement strategy that links many of the elements of a good maintenance program to achieve higher levels of equipment effectiveness. It includes a set of techniques pioneered by Denso in the Toyota Group in Japan, to ensure that each machine in our production process is always able to perform its required tasks.

The approach is called “total” in 4 main areas:

Total Participation supported by “Total” Leadership. Firstly TPM requires the total participation of all employees, not only maintenance personnel but line managers, manufacturing engineers, quality experts and operators. This involves everyone knowing their exact roles and responsibilities, and then executing those roles reliably, on a daily basis. For operators this will involve well developed checklists and simple maintenance tasks set out every shift. We will need to ensure that abnormalities are recorded and reported promptly to maintenance personnel for repair. The maintenance technicians will be required to look for ways to eliminate those problems and at least establish PM’s to ensure the problem does not reoccur. Engineering will be required to aid maintenance in ongoing equipment improvement. And managers will provide the discipline in the system by ensuring relevant metrics are collected and channeled into the problem solving process.

Total Productivity. Secondly TPM is aiming for total productivity of equipment by focusing on the six machine losses: breakdowns, changeovers, minor stops, speed losses, scrap and rework. Years of experience and measuring at Toyota has shown that up to 1/3 of all production downtime is caused by simple limit or proximity switch confirmation failures. Our aim should be to eliminate all production “downtime” and at least as a stopgap aim for “single minute maintenance”- less than 10 minutes for any breakdown.

Total Lifecycle. Thirdly TPM addresses reliability throughout the total life cycle of the equipment to revise maintenance practices, preventative maintenance intervals, activities and improvements depending on where the equipment is in its life cycle. TPM includes daily maintenance by operators, namely simple checking and lubrication that results in early detection and fixing of problems. This aspect is probably one of the most significant aspects of TPM. This may involve more widespread use of “Condition Monitoring”. Specialists become involved to carry out “machine kaizen” or corrective maintenance. At Toyota this is the result of detailed studies over the whole life of the equipment to see where time, spare parts and dollars have been consumed, all in the search of maintenance prevention.

Total Systems approach. TPM also includes a focus on the whole system with a constant effort to improving all aspects of the equipment lifecycle, pursuit of efficiency and participation by everyone. This includes linking and improving all support activities eg employee training and development, spare parts management, document control, maintenance data collection and analysis, and feedback to equipment vendors.

Unlike traditional reactive and preventative maintenance, which relies on maintenance personnel, TPM involves operators in routine maintenance, improvement projects and simple repairs. This would typically include daily activities such as lubrication, cleaning, tightening and inspecting equipment.

In this way, for those of us with equipment centric processes, TPM is an important part of Lean Manufacturing.

Adapted from Robert M Williamson - Strategic Work Systems and the Lean Lexicon - Lean Enterprise Institute

Recently Efficiency Works exhibited at the 2008 Queensland Manufacturing Technology Exhibition (QMan) held at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre from October 21-23.  During the exhibition we met many new people interested in Lean Manufacturing and refreshed some existing acquaintances.  During the exhibition many visitors listened to a range of interesting speakers.

The keynote speaker was Andrew Smith from the University of Ballarat who presented the findings from a research project completed for the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER). The research project is called “To have and to hold: Retaining and utilising skilled people” and covers the issues companies should be focusing on in order to attract and retain good staff.  The findings highlighted the importance of creating the right learning environment and in particular the need to provide nationally recognised training similar to the Lean Manufacturing training available through Efficiency Works.

The full report can be found at www.ncver.edu.au/research/proj/nr06004.pdf

So what is lean manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing, also referred to as “lean thinking”, is a term coined sometime in the late 80’s/earlier 90’s. The term stems from a book entitled, The Machine That Changed the World. The books was written based on research done by MIT who were looking at the car manufacturer Toyota and what they were doing in the way they were building cars. The MIT researchers were looking at the production system within Toyota and how it differed from other car manufacturers and other traditional mass production processes.
Essentially, lean manufacturing is a business system that constitutes organizing and managing everything in the organization that results in creating a product or providing a service using less effort, less space, less invested capital, less materials, and less time. While working through the process, the company is still producing exactly what the customer wants and provides a product or service with fewer defects. While lean manufacturing was pioneered by Toyota, it has become a new paradigm for manufacturing and has grown in both breadth and size since that time.
In 1996, two men named Womack and Jones who were from England, wrote the book Lean Thinking. In 2007, they began to change the way lean manufacturing was described. They split up the concept into purpose, process, and people. It is about what the customer really wants and sees as valuable and then building on that through the development process, through the manufacturing process, and carries it through right until fulfillment, support, and essentially for the life of the product. The lean manufacturing process now encourages a culture where everyone is involved with product or service improvement on a continuous basis, based on the values that have been identified.
Customers are expecting a lot more than in years past as far as pricing and lead times. Lean manufacturing may have started out based on the car industry but has since grown into a concept used by most manufacturing companies in order to remain competitive. While the term lean is a bit misleading, it is all about making the manufacturing process more efficient and better for both the business and the customer. Businesses have more of a capacity to grow and the concept is not difficult for any type of manufacturing business to understand or incorporate into their current structure. It is simply about being more organized, more efficient in the workplace. Most importantly businesses need to keep in mind that they need to keep identifying the constraints in their business and use the lean manufacturing process to keep working to improve on those limitations.