Total productive maintenance, without the poster campaign

Total productive maintenance is the idea that the people who run a machine should carry out its basic daily care, so that the maintenance team can spend its time on work that needs a trade. Cleaning, checking, lubricating, tightening, and reporting anything odd.

That idea works. Most of the programme built around it does not, and the difference is worth knowing before you start.

The part that works

Operators are at the machine every hour. They hear it change, they see the leak start, and they know what normal sounds like better than anybody who visits monthly. Giving them a short daily routine and a fast way to report an oddity catches faults weeks before a scheduled inspection would.

Keep the operator routine genuinely short

Five items, under three minutes, at a fixed point in the shift. Longer than that and it gets done from memory at the end of the day, which is worse than not doing it because now you have a record saying it was checked.

• •Clean the area so leaks and loose parts are visible
• •Look and listen for anything different from yesterday
• •Check the two or three levels that matter on this machine
• •Record one reading
• •Report anything odd, in one tap, with a photograph

The part that usually fails

The eight-pillar diagram, the steering committee, the colour-coded wall chart and the training matrix. These arrive first in most programmes because they are visible and easy to buy. They produce meetings.

If the operator routine and the reporting path are not working, nothing above them matters. Build those two, prove they catch faults, then add structure if it is still needed. Usually less of it is needed than the programme assumed.

The number that tells you it is working

Count faults first reported by an operator rather than found by a technician or discovered as a breakdown. If that number is rising, the programme is real. If it is near zero after three months, the routine is being completed without being done.

Where it fits with OEE

TPM and OEE are usually sold together, and they do belong together: the operator routine attacks the losses OEE measures, and OEE tells you which losses to attack. Just be sure the measurement is running before the improvement programme, or you will have no way to tell whether any of it helped.