Total Productive Maintenance is a systemic approach to plant maintenance that aims to achieve productionwithout failures, stoppages, or defects, with everyone involved in the performance of activities.
Maintenance is defined as the set of activities aimed at keeping machinery in good operating condition with the goal that business production processes can take place without interruption and without generating defects related to plant malfunctions.
Until about 1950 the common practice was maintenance at failure, or breakdown maintenance. This was based on the principle of intervening only when a breakdown occurred, replacing damaged components. Repair was the key activity to restore the plant or machinery to serviceability. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a shift to preventive maintenance, or preventive maintenance, a new approach based on anticipating possible failures of the most stressed or stress-prone components that provided planned interventions aimed at reducing the impact of wear and tear and neglect, thus preventing failures. Finally, in the 1970s, maintenance prevention, or maintenance prevention, was introduced, which focused on the study of maintenance as early as the design phase of plants, with the aim of simplifying maintenance and reducing future failures.
This evolution led to the development of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), which brings together the knowledge gained from previous approaches with everyone's involvement to achieve the goal of zero unplanned outages and zero generated defects.
The TPM can be divided into four key points:
Adapt expedients at the design or purchase stage of machinery that facilitate maintenance. For example: transparent protective covers, gauges and indicators placed in ergonomic positions.
2. Autonomous maintenanceImplementing autonomous maintenance, that is, the set of all improvement activities that can be carried out by operators in such a way as to minimize the use of external maintenance specialists. From reporting anomalies to achieving complete autonomous management through cleaning, inspection, and maintenance management.
3. Preventive maintenancePreventive maintenance to avoid breakdowns and reduce production downtime. This type of maintenance makes it possible to monitor component behavior over time, improve working methods, simplify activities, and optimize machine maintenance. It also helps identify which maintenance interventions are most effective and necessary.
4. Predictive maintenancePredictive maintenance that allows triggering maintenance actions on the basis of measured and processed parameters using mathematical models that can calculate, with a high level of accuracy, how much time remaining before failure.
In auxiell, we follow the scientific method characterized by the steps of Scan, Plan, Do, Check and Act to apply TPM in the company.
The Scan phase allows the identification of which plant is a priority to start with TPM. The choice is the result of measurements and/or data analysis: identifying what and how many unplanned shutdowns machines experience, what impact they have on time and scrap, and how machine capacity changes. Once the machine or plant with the highest impact on the production process has been identified, it advances to the plan phase.
The Plan allows defining the activities to be performed in 5W2H logic and the objectives of maintenance activities in terms of KPIs and related targets. The main operation indicators are: number/duration/frequency of unplanned shutdowns and overall plant effectiveness (OEE).
The phase of Do is the operational phase where the activities planned in the defined action plan are executed.
The Check phase is where it is verified that the activities have been carried out in accordance with the plan and that the objectives have been achieved, analyzing in contrary cases the problem to identify the root cause.
The Act is the phase in which the standardization of the new method and its application to other processes that would benefit from it, thus extending the TPM framework to other machinery takes place.