TPM

Total Productive Maintenance or TPM is a program that aims to combine the increase of production and the improvement of employee morale.TPM is predominately a program for those who are incorporating newly developed concepts into the plant.The key to TPM is the maintenance portion.Although maintenance has long been regarded as a non-profit activity within the business, more and more business professionals are realizing just how vital maintenance process are to the survival of a profitable business.Scheduled maintenance can be planned and accounted for in the transactions of the day.Emergency maintenance on the other hand is neither predictable in when it occurs nor how long the plant is hindered because of it.A little maintenance planning goes a long way to reduce the amount of unscheduled maintenance and costly downtime.

The initial objectives that should be kept in mind when considering the implementation of TPM include avoiding 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 and to ensure that goods sent to the customers are free from defect.

One of the major factors that makes TPM different from other concepts in the manufacturing business is that in the TPM program, workers or operators are just as much a part of the maintenance process as are the machines.In other processes the role of the worker is simply to fix or to run quality control, in this role the worker is part of the operation.Workers from different teams are involved in the one process of reducing defects in the product that they all have their part in producing.All levels of the organization are involved in the objectives of TPM, which are to achieve no defects, have no breakdowns and work free of accidents in all functional areas of the organization.

TPM has benefits that are both direct and indirect.Direct benefits of TPM are that productivity is increased.With TPM there is the potential to have an increase in OPE (Overall Plant Efficiency) by 1.5 or 2 times.Another goal of TPM is to rectify customer complaints.It makes more sense for an n organization to better make improvements in the process to provide the customer with more benefits in the long run, if they are in integral part of the process to begin with.In other words, there is direct applicability to customer satisfaction because all employees have a piece of the responsibility for the end product.Therefore another direct benefit of TPM is that the needs of the customer can be satisfied by 100% due to the fact that the goals of TPM include delivering the right quantity at the right time, in the required quality.TPM can also reduce manufacturing costs, in some cases by as much as 30%. Accidents are reduced when TPM principles are enforced and the company is more environmentally responsible by their following of safety measures (such as pollution control).

Indirect benefits of TPM can often be some of the more motivating ones for the employees themselves.This is because the indirect benefits fall mainly on the employees rather than the customer.TPM can lead to higher confidence level among the employees.It can also lead to a work place that is clean, neat and attractive.This indirectly benefits the workers again because it allows for better experiences working as a team and having a better attitude about the workplace.With TPM, upper-management is not an entity that is hidden from the rest.Managers and operators can see each other's roles clearly and the flow of ideas is encouraged across the board rather than up through a chain of command.This allowance of free flowing ideas allows the workers to feel more like they are responsible for the machines that they operate because it was their input that helped to shape the job that they are doing.