Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance program, which involves a newly defined concept for maintaining plants and equipment. The goal of the TPM program is to markedly increase production while, at the same time, increasing employee morale and job satisfaction. It can be considered as the medical science of machines.
TPM brings maintenance into focus as a necessary and vitally important part of the business. It is no longer regarded as a non-profit activity. Downtime for maintenance is scheduled as a part of the manufacturing day and, in some cases, as an integral part of the manufacturing process. The goal is to hold emergency and unscheduled maintenance to a minimum. TPM was introduced to achieve the following objectives. The important ones are listed below.
- Avoid 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.
- Goods send to the customers must be non-defective.
Similarities and Differences between TQM and TPM
The TPM program closely resembles the popular Total Quality Management (TQM) program. Many of the tools such as, employee empowerment, benchmarking, documentation, etc. used in TQM are used to implement and optimize TPM. Following are the similarities between the two:
1. Total commitment to the program by upper level management is required in both programmes,
2. Employees must be empowered to initiate corrective action, and
3. A long-range outlook must be accepted as TPM may take a year or more to implement and is an on-going process. Changes in employee mind-set toward their job responsibilities must take place as well.
