How would I implement a total productive maintenance program?
When implementing total productive maintenance (TPM), it’s best to gradually phase it in. The reason for this is it will essentially enable an organization-wide adjustment to your culture and practices over time. Everyone is involved in TPM, so you’ll likely have a number of hurdles to overcome.
That said, following these steps should help.
1. Pick a Single Machine
To begin, start with one machine and build out from there. By starting small, you’ll be able to learn and perfect your processes before you expand.
When choosing a machine, you may want to go for an asset that’s critical to your process. This will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your TPM more easily, and it will also tend to involve more employees. On the other hand, you might opt for a less critical asset. It’ll be harder to measure success, but it will be lower risk.
2. Instill Foundational Practices
Once you’ve picked an asset to pilot your TPM program, it’s time to start training your operations crew on some foundational practices. In TPM, these practices are referred to as 5S, which stands for the following:
- Sort
- Straighten
- Shine
- Standardize
- Sustain
5S essentially sets the groundwork for keeping work areas neat and orderly while also getting the asset into basic condition. On top of that, it also sets the stage for autonomous maintenance, i.e. maintenance where the operations crew handles upkeep tasks automatically.
What is autonomous maintenance?
3. Plan Preventive Maintenance
Once you have your groundwork laid out, it’s time to start working on improving your equipment’s effectiveness. The primary way of doing this is through preventive maintenance.
The PM tasks you plan should be designed to improve the asset’s performance, reduce downtime, and increase reliability.
4. Make Adjustments and Expand
As you engage in regular maintenance, keep the asset clean and in good working order, and collect data on the results, you’ll likely find ways to improve. Continuous improvement is one of the eight pillars of TPM, so figuring out how you can do better is an essential part of the process.
As you improve your maintenance processes, you’ll be able to extend your TPM to other assets and eventually to your organization as a whole.
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Autonomous maintenance is a type of maintenance that focuses on empowering machine operators to make the necessary maintenance decisions and fixes without the aid of a specialized maintenance technician. It’s generally a part of a total productive maintenance strategy and is considered to be the first steppingstone to these types of strategic plans.
Autonomous maintenance has an impact on all other maintenance types. By enabling the people who work on these machines to notice, fix, and improve day-to-day operations, strategies that once covered things like routine maintenance, and corrective maintenance can be rolled into your operators’ tasks instead of your maintenance technicians’ days.
This is because the core idea of autonomous maintenance is to provide day-to-day operators with more responsibility and to better maintain your machines and other equipment.
It’s good to know that this is just a brief overview of autonomous maintenance. There’s much more beyond the simple definitions.
How do I implement autonomous maintenance?
There are five simple steps to implementing autonomous maintenance:
The top benefits of autonomous maintenance
Some of the best benefits of autonomous maintenance include:
–Lowering labor costs.
–Increasing the availability of specialists.
–Improving team cohesiveness and community.
– Educating all members of your team on proper protocol for your equipment.
– And much more.
At the end of the day, autonomous maintenance is all about putting power back into machine operators’ hands so that they can fix, maintain, and care for the equipment they know the best.