Total Productive Maintenance and 5S are two methodologies that seem somewhat distant, but the reality is that applying them effectively at the same time can lead to a great synergetic effect that boosts the performance of your company even more. In the end, they both strive to achieve the same goal in different way, with 5S being a more detailed implementation that covers more basis. From some points of view, TPM can be viewed as a subset of 5S, although that’s not really a correct way to view the situation as there are some intricate differences.

Prolonging the Lifetime of Your Assets

The core of TPM is about ensuring that your physical assets like tools and machines can last a long time through clever application of preventive maintenance. But you shouldn’t just focus on the tools themselves it’s also important to consider the environment in which they’re used, as well as the procedures applied in their use.

5S pays a lot of attention to proper organization and maintenance of the workplace itself, not just the tools that are used in the everyday work. Keeping your material base in a good condition isn’t just about maintaining the tools themselves. For example, if your workers have to constantly spend a lot of time looking for the right tool for the job due to a poorly organized storage, this can end up costing you a lot when some of those tools end up forgotten and ultimately ignored in their regular maintenance.

Keeping Things Simple and Streamlined for Your Workers

When all tools are operating correctly and the workplace is maintained in a good condition, everyone will find their job easier to perform and far less time will end up wasted in unnecessary communication. This is a common source of waste for many organizations, especially ones going through a period of quick expansion where many new workers are taken on board. You’ll want to be careful and plan for those situations accordingly, and proper ongoing maintenance is a great way to ensure that you won’t find yourself in a tough situation after a period of success.

5S also puts a lot of emphasis on standardization, which can further help improve the current state of your operations and make things easier for new employees. A commonly applied idea in 5S, for example, is to color-code items according to the way they’re used. You can combine this with TPM and apply different colors to items that are in need of specific types of maintenance. You can even match the colors with the condition grades recognized by TPM and easily combine the two methodologies.

Standardizing Maintenance Procedures

Why not take this one step further? You can standardize the very way things are being maintained in good condition, giving your workers the opportunity to perform maintenance themselves without having to wait for someone to tell them. Enabling this kind of proactive maintenance from your workers themselves can be a very powerful tool, one that can have a long-lasting positive impact on the company as a whole.

For example, a worker capable of repairing a specific tool shouldn’t have to wait for his supervisor to confirm the repair, as long as he can be held accountable for any problems that might occur later on. This can speed things up in situations where equipment issues arise, and it can also help bring everyone up to speed with how those maintenance procedures are to be performed. Of course, you should still have a set of dedicated specialists taking care of the most important repair procedures, but it definitely can’t hurt if you get everyone on board in some capacity.

Conclusion

Combining two methodologies with so much power behind them like Total Productive Maintenance and 5S can lead to some amazing results, especially in an organization that suffers a lot from waste in equipment condition. Of course, you should approach this in a careful and educated way instead of just blindly rushing to glue the two together, but as long as you’re already somewhat experienced with lean practices and the appropriate way of thinking that they require, you shouldn’t face any difficult issues.

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Total Productive Maintenance or TPM for short is a popular technique in the industrial sector developed to address the waste that can be created through improper handling of tools and other equipment over a longer term. It helps the organization’s leadership ensure that resources aren’t unnecessarily expended to keep the company’s assets in good working condition, and it emphasizes preventive measures that can help catch problems before they develop into more threatening issues.

Goals and Core Ideas

The main idea behind TPM is to help an organization increase its productivity by decreasing the frequency at which equipment has to be replaced. The exact way this is implemented will vary from one organization to another, mostly depending on the type of equipment in use. But in general, the methodology relies on getting everyone involved across all levels of the organization, especially the workers on the production floor who use their tools and machines on a daily basis.

Once TPM has been implemented in an organization correctly, it can lead to huge increases in productivity, with the final result of improving the profit margins of any production facility, in some cases significantly. Of course, the opposite is true as well if you go about this the wrong way and don’t consider some factors correctly, you may even see the productivity of the organization as a whole going down.

Looking at the Details

There are different ways in which equipment can lose its durability, and TPM aims to categorize them in order to make it as clear as possible where the underlying issue is. The three main categories examined by TPM are performance, availability, and quality. Each of those is further broken down into two categories, identifying the exact nature of the problem.

For example, issues with availability can either be due to tools breaking down and becoming unusable, or when the equipment has to change hands, which can take a long time. Both of these can create issues with the availability of a certain item, but they also require significantly different approaches to eliminate them.

Preventing Downtime Proactively

A fundamental principle of TPM is that you should take proactive steps to minimize the downtime caused by tool malfunctioning or unavailability. If you start addressing the problem after it’s already occurred, this can lead you to waste a lot of time, while it will also leave the organization open for future potential issues of the same kind.

This is where your entire workforce comes in, and why it’s so important to get everyone on board when you’re trying to implement Total Productive Maintenance. You will need to set up certain rules about the way equipment is handled, for example, and it makes no sense to spend a lot of time developing and implementing those rules only to see them disregarded by your employees later on.

Put some penalties in place if it’s necessary. This might raise some eyebrows and will probably draw some negative responses from various parts of the company, but in the end, it’s important that everyone is held responsible for their actions if they are dragging down the performance of the whole organization.

Developing a system where employees can cross-check each other’s work is also a good idea when you want to ensure that instrument-related issues are minimized. It’s not uncommon for a person to make a mistake, especially in a routine process that they’ve done hundreds of times before, but it’s much rarer to see this happening when people are verifying each other’s work and these verifications are being tracked.

This can also have the positive side effect of developing better relations between your workers, as they will start trusting each other more and relying on each other’s expertise in their work more actively. Which, just by itself, can boost the productivity of the organization quite a bit.

Conclusion

Total Productive Maintenance is not really new as a concept, but it’s just as relevant today as it was at its inception. When applied correctly, it can significantly reduce the waste an organization creates in its daily work, and it can resolve many issues related to long periods of downtime as well. And once you’ve set it up once, it doesn’t take too much effort to maintain the system and keep it in a good state.

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