TPM means productive maintenance (activities in which all workers of a corporation are required to participate) and stands for total productive maintenance.

  • T stands for “Total”
  • P stands for “Productive”
  • M stands for “Maintenance”

Necessity of TPM and why TPM is required now?

The economic environment surrounding corporations becomes even more severe and total elimination of waste is required for the survival of the corporation. Therefore, wastes generated due to the failure shutdown of facilities which have been built with huge investment and wastes such as defective products should be absolutely eliminated.

Requirements for product quality become even more stringent and not even one defective product should be allowed. Quality-assured delivery of total quantity is now taken for granted.

The small-lot production of various kinds of products and shortening of production lead time have been strongly required to meet diversified customer needs. That is to say, TPM to reduce the 8 major equipment losses to zero has been recognized as necessary for corporate survival.

TPM has been developed based on the PM (preventive maintenance or productive maintenance) concept and methodology introduced from the U.S.A.

  • Preventive Maintenance (PM: 1951 ~) can be said to be a kind of physical  check-up of equipment and also a kind of preventive medicine for the  equipment. Just as the human life expectancy has been expanded by the  progress in preventive medicine to prevent human suffering from disease, the plant equipment service life can be prolonged by preventing premature  equipment failure.
  • Corrective Maintenance (CM: 1957 ~) is a system in which the concept to  prevent equipment failures has been further expanded to be applied to the  improvement of equipment so that equipment failure can be eliminated  (improving the reliability) or equipment can be easily maintained (improving maintainability).
  • Maintenance Prevention (MP: :1960 ~) is an activity to design the  equipment and line to be maintenance-free. As the ultimate goal of the equipment and line is.to keep them completely maintenance-free, every effort should be made to try to achieve the ultimate ideal condition of “what the  equipment and the line must be.” All these activities to improve equipment
  • !n 1971, Nippon Denso Co., Ltd first introduced and successfully implemented TPM in Japan.  The won the PM Excellent Plant Award for their activities. This was the beginning of TPM in Japan. Since then, TPM has spread throughout Japan, especially in the Toyota group.

TPM aims at

  1. Establishing. a corporate culture that will maximize production system effectiveness,
  2. Organizing a “genba-geributsu” system to prevent losses and achieve such “reduction-to-zero” targets as “zero-accidents”, “zero-defects” and “zero-breakdowns” in the entire production system life-cycle,
  3. Involving all functions of an organization including production, development, sales and management,
  4. Involving every member of an organization, from top management to front-line operators, and 5. Achieving zero losses through the activities of overlapping small groups.