Absent TPM, the Lean Enterprise Doesn’t Happen.
Developing a strategy to establish TPM – and integrate it as part of a lean transformation – begins with analyzing and understanding the key areas that need to be improved throughout your operations.
That involves establishing revenue goals, performing value stream analysis, creating key initiatives, identifying and sharing responsibilities for action items, and laying down milestones and rollout plans.
You may want to begin by asking yourself these fundamental business questions:
- How does your organization make money?
- How does it spend money?
- What drives profits, revenues, and margins?
- Where is the improvement focus?
- How do I get all my employees more actively involved?
The last item may be the most critical. Lean and TPM will have a profound and lasting effect on a company’s culture by emphasizing the role of employees in virtually every step of the production and maintenance process.
Successful TPM requires a mindset of commitment, an enterprise-wide strategy, recognition of what’s at stake, and an end goal of “World Class Status” for your organization. The initial steps you should consider taking include:
- Committing top management to full support of TPM;
- Generating a detailed implementation plan and roadmap;
- Putting in place Autonomous Maintenance;
- Adopting a data-driven philosophy;
- Creating a partnership between production, maintenance, and engineering;
- Instituting a ‘no-blame’ environment focused on root causes of problems.
The following five key points capture the high-level view of TPM, what makes it tick, and it’s importance for our organization.
- Total Productive Maintenance impacts your organization’s total operational process.
- It is designed to build and strengthen the capabilities of your people, your processes, and our equipment in order to maximize asset reliability and, ultimately company profits.
- TPM cuts deeper than preventive and predictive maintenance routines, works hand-in-hand with our lean strategy, and is fundamental to achieving true flow.
- Without the proactive commitment and everyday involvement of your workforce, TPM (like lean) is unsustainable.
- TPM transformations yield dramatic improvements in how employees perform their jobs, in the relationship between employees and management, and in their ability to work in teams and react positively to change.
If you’d like to talk more or have a question about TPM please reach out.
Ellis New, TPM Practice Leader