TPM Autonomous Maintenance

Objective of Planned Maintenance pillar in TPM is to enhance natural life of the equipment by focuses on two key category of activities:

  • Maintenance Activities to fix and prevent failures
  • Improvement Activities
    • To extend life span of part,
    • To shorten maintenance time
    • To avoid maintenance

Planned Maintenance has following 7 steps:

  • Support Autonomous Maintenance Teams
  • Understand Equipment Failures
  • Reverse Deterioration
  • Build Information Management system
  • Build Periodic Maintenance system
  • Build Predictive Maintenance system
  • Evaluate and improve

In Planned Maintenance step 1, maintenance team supports the Autonomous Maintenance activity by training operators to identify & correct abnormalities on their machines. Following are roles of Maintenance team in Planned Maintenance step 1

Autonomous Maintenance Step 1:

  • To explain machine function and mechanical functions and define basic conditions – normal and abnormal
  • Guidance for Identification of cleaning, inspection and lubrication items and Cleaning tools management
  • Abnormality identification training – and teach about red/white tags
  • Teach how to develop One Point lessons
  • Help to dis-cover difficult to access areas
  • Inspection while cleaning –teaching this to operators.
  • Training the operators on moving parts, functional inspection of the rotating mechanisms, to find out abnormalities and making operators judge pass-fail criteria.

Autonomous Maintenance Step 2:

  • Assist and implement countermeasures for sources of contamination by fabricating
  • carrying out trials, installing and improving guards etc. This will include activities such as:
  • Make machine easy to clean, lubricate and tighten – by operator with their involvement.
  • Conducting WHY-WHY analysis of breakdown and if the reason being lack of Autonomous Maintenance activities then fill the skill gap.
  • Prepare localized guards & Arrest leakages
  • Removal of red/pink tags – explain and do.
  • Rectifying the major abnormalities, which cannot be done by operators.
  • To train the operators for developing, with one point lessons.
  • To train operators to conduct daily autonomous maintenance activities safely.
  • Attend to suggestions made by operators in form of countermeasures by AM team that they couldn’t implement themselves.

Autonomous Maintenance Step 3:

  • Preparation of visual control – to make the changes in equipment including auxiliary units so that they are easy to clean, access, inspect and lubricate.(Re-tighten) make the equipment ‘visually controllable’ by operators
  • Decide frequency for Cleaning, lubricating, tightening, making the method to do it and decide who will do what. Then teach that person ‘How’ to do.
  • Provide the right kind of tools near the machine for operator to use. Similarly provide appropriate tools to maintenance for their work
  • Prepare Breakdown sheet on which all breakdowns will be recorded and analysed
  • Correct abnormalities that are identified through inspection.
  • Establish standards for lubrication and monitoring pressure/temperatures
  • Establish standards for cleaning

Planned Maintenance Step 2: Understanding Equipment failures. 

Following key activities are done in PM Step 2

  • Collect data on all failures/ breakdowns
  • Prepare Equipment control ledger
  • Do Equipment Ranking & Select High Rank Equipment for PM activities
  • Understand current conditions based on OEE, MTBF, MTTR, Maintenance Costs etc

Planned Maintenance Step 3 focuses on reversing deterioration by focusing on following key activities

  • Root Cause Analysis on breakdowns and Design improvements to reduce natural breakdown
  • Develop Skill to forecast breakdowns, Develop countermeasures, Measure & Monitor MTBF MTTR
  • Implement and Follow Time based Maintenance and Condition based Maintenance systems