Getting back to basics –

Total Preventive
Maintenance
Introduction to the Article:
In the last 15 years of working in big MNCs and
fortune 500 companies, mostly as a quality
professional, I have participated and witnessed
organisations adopt and implement various versions
of the fundamentals, principals, tools and philosophy
developed by one of the pioneers of manufacturing
over a period of several years - The Toyota Production
System.
In this article, I would like to go back to the basics and
talk about Lean, specifically TPM (Total Preventive
Maintenance). But wait, I wouldn’t just talk about
TPM in the context of manufacturing, and would
touch upon its adaptation in service industry as well
aka Total People/Process Management, Total Profit
Management, etc. I hope this short article would help
seasoned quality professionals refresh their memories
and provide some interesting read for the quality
aficionados.
Mostly, I would like to start a discussion between people
who are passionate about change and process
optimization.
Back to Basics: Lean and TPM
Lean as we know is a methodology to provide what
customers wants (value), when they want it and
preferably at the lowest cost (COPQ concepts), in
another words, Lean manufacturing is a process of using
the minimum number of people, inventories, suppliers,
equipment, tools, etc to give customers what they want
and on time. It’s no surprise this methodology has
transcended across industries. While this transcendence
was taking place a lot of lean tools have been
transformed to meet the specific needs of industries,
TPM being one of those important Lean tools also
underwent a transformation from its original form.
TPM is an approach that stresses on proactive and
preventive maintenance. It dilutes the distinction
between the roles of production and maintenance by
engaging operators to maintain their equipment (see
figure1). The objective is to achieve perfect
production by means of no breakages, no slow
running or small stops, no defects and addresses
safety by means of no accidents, all aligned to the
belief that it is not possible to consistently provide
quality products or services with unreliable or
defective processes and equipment. Preventive
maintenance is a big subject in itself and has various
maturity models (CMM, ISO, etc) and complexities
defined, which won’t be covered in the scope of this Figure 1 – Evolution of TPM
article.
Metrics that matter
The focus to measure the effectiveness in TPM is
driven by two key metrics
• OEE – Overall Equipment Efficiency, primarily used
in manufacturing industry
• OPE – Overall Performance Efficiency, used in
service industry
OEE strives to monitor and improve the effectiveness
of the manufacturing process namely machines,
manufacturing cells, assembly lines etc by
incorporating best practices. Simply put OEE measures
the percentage of planned productive time that was
actually productive. The most frequent of critical
manufacturing losses are placed into three categories
to distil them into metrics thereby providing a better
gauge to measure where you are and the
opportunities for improvement.
The metrics are mentioned below and are often
expressed in percentages.
• Equipment availability loss –takes into consideration
equipment failures, adjustments and set-ups
• Performance loss - takes into consideration Speed of
process, minor stops or idling
• Quality loss – takes into consideration defects, rejects
and other losses like startup losses
An OEE of 85% is considered to be world class.
While OEE works best for an isolated equipment, it
really may not be sufficient as most factories do not
work on isolated machine. This brings us to OPE. In the
real world, multiple machines are involved, arranged in
multiple ways, with variations in performance leading to
bottlenecks and need for load levelling. Hence, it is
important to have a measurement in place to measure
the performance of a set of equipment, in other words
the performance of the process.
OPE has also been adopted in the service industry
extensively. OPE indicates how people/process are
performing and provide a base for improvement
efforts to support business goals. The three
components measured as part of OPE are:

• Scheduling and Abnormalities – Mostly in the

ambit of scheduling and staffing for WFM and
system downtime and planned outages for IT.
• Operator Performance – In scope and peripheral
process would include QMS, LMS/KMS etc
• Process Performance – primarily part of the QMS
which would include Quality audits and Customer
experience parameters.
All these factors measure the value and non value
within a process such as waiting, change-over,
retrieving, cell motion, rework etc. Figure 2 depicts
the traditional TPM with its foundation in 5S and the 8
pillars.
Figure 2 – Depicting a traditional TPM (source – web)
As a bonus, for the few people interested in further
reading and the six sigma geeks reading this article, it
would also be interesting to read further on the
relationship between OEE and Process capability as they
are both commonly used and well accepted measures of
performance in the industry. A link for one of the article
I found interesting on the subject is shared at the end of
this article. For the COPC experts, the mathematics
involved in calculating OEE are fairly very simple, and
these metrics are captured individually in Table F.

Benefits of TPM
Some of the benefits that organisations have realised
by deploying TPM include:
• Productivity increase and improved OEE
• Reduce customer complaints / improve customer
experience
• Reduce manufacturing cost (COPQ fundamentals)
• Reduce accidents
• Higher confidence among employees
• Horizontal development of new ideas in all areas
across organisation
• Increased ownership by operators
Simplified Roadmap for TPM
Deployment
A sample roadmap for deployment of TPM is listed
here, specific to manufacturing. These steps can be
modified to meet service industry specific or
organisation specific roadmap. This roadmap is
created with the goal of TPM acceptance,
create support from management, employees, vendors
etc, create enthusiasm and positive expectations,
establish realistic goals and achieve goals on time.
However, deployment of TPM is not a short term fix
program and must have appropriate buy ins before
deployment.
• Top Management Involvement and strategy
definition
• This step would require identifying key
influencers in management. Key areas of
opportunity that could be positively
impacted by implementation TPM.
Management must be made aware of the
organisational specifics and key benefits,
ideally with a business case.
• Identify branding opportunity (E-mail,
Newsletter, website etc) to communicate
and reinforce management support for
TPM initiative, this would reduce
scepticism and resistance to change.
• TPM education and awareness and information
collection
• In this phase key stakeholders are identified
and educated on TPM, its benefits and
objectives.
• Education methods and preparedness are key.
E.g. Retreat for GMs and above Vs workshops
for managers. Methods have to be designed
keeping in mind the organisational culture,
policies and guidelines amongst others.
• Establish organizational structure
• Ideally a group must be created with
representation from various areas of the
organisation and across levels. Key
responsibilities of this group would be to
promote and sustain TPM activities once they
have been initiated.
• This team would also be responsible for
communication and awareness; culture
building.
• Representation from across organisation and
level is ideal.
• Formulate TPM policies and goals
• This phase would analyse the current situation,
environment etc and set goals that is SMART,
predict potential results and finally formulate
goals and policies aligned to their findings,
organisational aspirations, etc.
• These goals and policies must be socialised to
ensure awareness.
• Master plan for TPM deployment
• Detailed master plan for deployment is prepared
and presented to management.
• Pointers that can be added to the plan include
benefits for the plant / process, sequence of
implementation, customized deployment
strategy, support needed etc.
• Feasibility study and ROI
• Create baseline and measure baseline OEE etc,
this would enable the management to see the
benefits associated with TPM deployment
• Identify challenges and risks along with
mitigations and support needed
 • Communicate to relevant stakeholders and
management
• Pilot installation
• A pilot generally covers between 10% to 25%
of the plant equipment and not a few selected
machines.
• A good feasibility study is needed to identify
the right pilot area
• Factors to consider while identifying pilot
include easiest to improve (low hanging
fruits), constraints/bottleneck, most
problematic, etc
• Involve full spectrum of employees associated
with the pilot area e.g. operators, managers,
maintenance staff etc
• Incorporate other best practices such as
Andon board
• Plant wide installation
• TPM coordinators generally wait too long
before expanding over to the whole plant.
• It is not necessary to wait for the final result of
the pilot as long as the expansion plan is well
thought through and staggered.
• Introducing audits
• To ensure good progress and successful
implementation, audits are very useful.
• The initial audit primarily focuses on TPM
fundamentals being done correctly (Teamwork,
organization, Task, PM development, etc) and if
the deployment is on schedule.
• Progress audits
• It is important to have internal audits in place to
be prepared for certifications based on the goals
established earlier. Audits provide the teams
with insights into the areas that need to be
strengthened to ensure adherence to
certification standards.
• Certification
• Based on the goals and strategy decided by
the management, organisations may go
through certification process. Certification
level for CMM is discussed more in the next
section.
• TPM awards
• Awards recognises plants and provide the with
incentive to follow TPM more rigorously. It
also recognises the organisations standards
with competitors.
TPM Maturity Model (CMM)
In general Maturity models are created to help
organisations decide on strategies and identifying
goals. They provide a checklist of attributes to be
achieved to move up the levels. Elevating on maturity
levels often require resource commitments and
involves a cost. It is imperative for organisations to
evaluate the returns
against maturity levels and practical implications before
embarking on the journey.
One of the widely accepted maturity models in last
couple of decades is CMM for software (Capability
Maturity Models). Inspired from principles of TQM (Total
Quality Management - Crosby: 1979), and the general
improvement idea was built into the model from work
done in improvement in organizations (Juran and Gryna
1988, Deming 1982). There are various models available
to depict the CMM maturity model, e.g. Paulk 1993,
Siemens KMMM model, Mitre KM-CMM, KPQM, Infosys
KM etc. Figure 3 provides the CMM maturity level and
attributes specific to TPM.
Figure 3: TPM CMM Maturity Model (source- TPM Guidebook)
Conclusion
In my experience, although TPM is an integral part of
TQM, this important technique is not well understood
and adopted in the service industry, one of the
reasons is that this is not given enough emphasis
during Lean Six Sigma trainings within and outside
organisations. Also, the understanding of CMM being
restricted to software development solely should be
challenged and quality professionals must reintroduce
and embed these concepts to QMS strategies.

OEE and Process Capability.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235252240_Overall_equipment_effec
tiveness_OEE_and_process_capability_PC_measures