How many times on the ground are machine breakdowns, corrective maintenance, unexpected events, spare parts that do not arrive…, delay our production, impact our costs and make maintenance and production more enemy than a team.
TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) is the methodology within the Lean philosophy, which allows to improve people’s ability to identify and eliminate all losses of the facilities. The secret is the rigorous application of maintenance standards.
The classic conception, divides the manufacturing into 2 roles. One is maintenance based on periodic reviews and troubleshooting. The other is manufacturing as such with operators dedicated exclusively to manufacturing.
The Lean conception, turns the classic concept.
Manufacturing is not divided into roles, in Total Productive Maintenance, all workers participate in the prevention, detection and correction of anomalies in the design or operation of machines (tasks such as; machine cleaning, inspection, greasing or detection and repair of defects)
The 2 great advantages of this concept are that:
- The operators are the ones who know the most about their machines,
- therefore, they are the most capable for their maintenance.
Operators feel like the owners of the machine they control.
So we talk about other maintenance, autonomous maintenance. In this type of maintenance the manufacturing operators perform some maintenance functions:
- Initial cleaning and 5S inspection.
- Detection of anomalys using tags.
- Cleaning, lubricating and inspection standards.
- Autonomous management. Level maintenance.