Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)

TPM is structured around eight pillars. Autonomous Maintenance trains operators to perform basic equipment care — cleaning, lubricating, tightening, inspecting — transforming them from mere machine users into equipment caretakers. Planned Maintenance establishes a systematic schedule of preventive and predictive maintenance activities based on equipment condition and failure history. Quality Maintenance identifies equipment conditions that produce defects and establishes controls to prevent them. Focused Improvement applies small cross-functional teams to eliminate the chronic losses identified by OEE analysis. Early Equipment Management feeds lessons from existing equipment into the design and installation of new equipment, reducing startup losses. Training and Education develops the technical skills operators and maintenance staff need for their TPM roles. Safety, Health, and Environment ensures that TPM activities improve rather than compromise workplace safety. TPM in Office/Administration extends TPM thinking to administrative processes that support production. Together, these eight pillars create a comprehensive system for maximizing equipment effectiveness.

Autonomous maintenance (AM) is typically the first TPM pillar implemented because it creates the most immediate and visible impact. AM is deployed in seven steps. Step 1: Initial cleaning — operators thoroughly clean their equipment, discovering hidden defects like leaks, cracks, loose fasteners, and worn components. Step 2: Countermeasures for contamination sources — identify and address the root causes of dirt, dust, and leaks rather than repeatedly cleaning. Step 3: Cleaning and lubrication standards — document what to clean, lubricate, and inspect, how often, and to what standard. Step 4: General inspection — train operators to inspect all major sub-systems (hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, mechanical) and detect abnormalities. Step 5: Autonomous inspection — operators perform comprehensive inspections using checklists they helped develop. Step 6: Organization and tidiness — apply 5S principles to the equipment and surrounding area. Step 7: Full autonomous maintenance — operators independently manage routine equipment care, freeing maintenance technicians for higher-skill predictive and corrective work. Each step builds competence and confidence, transforming the operator-equipment relationship from adversarial to collaborative.

TPM directly improves production scheduling reliability by increasing equipment availability and reducing unplanned downtime. When breakdowns are frequent and unpredictable, production schedules become meaningless — planners build in excessive buffers and customers receive unreliable delivery dates. As TPM reduces breakdown frequency and duration, schedule adherence improves and planners can commit to tighter delivery windows. Planned maintenance windows — scheduled during low-demand periods or dedicated maintenance shifts — are incorporated into the production calendar in LinePlanner, ensuring that maintenance and production do not compete for the same time slots. TPM also stabilizes cycle times by preventing the gradual equipment degradation that causes slowdowns, improving the accuracy of scheduling calculations. The OEE metric, which is central to TPM, provides the real-world efficiency factor that schedulers need: rather than scheduling against theoretical capacity, they use OEE-adjusted capacity for realistic plans. As OEE improves through TPM, the schedulable capacity increases — producing real throughput gains without capital investment.