Autonomous Maintenance

One of the things that distinguishes TPM is maintenance that brings the machine’s user into the maintenance work — above all the care of the machine he himself runs — rather than leaving it to the maintenance department alone.

Autonomous maintenance is carried out as small-group activity, each group responsible for its own machines, on four beliefs: nobody understands the machine as well as the person who runs it; nobody notices an abnormality as early; nobody looks after it as well; and — most important — when it breaks down, nobody is affected as much.

1. Autonomous maintenance means protecting your own machine

Maintaining your own machine means the operator can carry out the daily checks, lubricate it, change parts, make basic repairs, notice when something is not right, and from time to time inspect the equipment he runs in detail — all with one purpose: to protect his own machine.

In some industries, where the machines are highly complex or capacity is being expanded, a company may decide that operators should only produce, and that maintenance should look after every machine. But the thinking that “the person who runs it does not repair it” leaves the operator watching only for a process going wrong, paying no attention to the condition of the machine — and maintenance cannot get to a machine before it fails.

Worse, when the machine does fail, the operator concludes that maintenance did not look after it properly, or that the machine is a poor one. Both conclusions are wrong: the failure was preventable by tightening, lubricating and cleaning — and when a machine begins to show that it is about to fail, the first person in a position to see it is the operator.

So whatever the industry, and however complex the machine, the operator still has an important part in maintaining it himself.

2. Autonomous maintenance means becoming expert in your own machine

To maintain his own machine, the operator needs skills that belong to that machine: he must be able to improve it to a degree — cleaning, lubricating and inspecting it, considering its design, or bringing in automation to assist production. These are capabilities he has to keep developing.

Being expert in your own machine means first being able to detect an abnormality, and second being able to sense one that is about to appear — reading it from how the machine is running and from changes that do not belong. The expert operator feels immediately that something must be wrong. For that, he needs at least these abilities:

• The ability to set the standard for what normal looks like
• The ability to detect an abnormality
• The ability to notice it
• The ability to correct it appropriately

What those abilities let him do

An operator with those abilities can fairly be called an expert in his own machine: he can find what is wrong, sense what is about to go wrong, and find a way to prevent it.

• Find what is abnormal and put it right correctly
• Understand the machine’s construction and what each part does, both when it is running normally and when something is going wrong
• Understand what an abnormality does to the quality of what the machine produces

The roles of the operator and of maintenance

As said at the start, maintenance left to the maintenance department alone tends to happen after the machine has already failed — because the time when a machine deteriorates is the time it is running, which is precisely when maintenance is not beside it. That running time is the operator’s, and the two roles differ as follows.

1. The operator’s role

The operator’s role is to carry out the activities whose main purpose is to prevent the machine deteriorating. They fall into three groups.

Preventing deterioration — setting the correct operating standard, so that operator error is designed out; restoring basic conditions, meaning cleaning, lubrication and tightening; adjustment, setting the running parameters so the machine runs as it should; and reporting and detecting abnormality, which prevents both breakdowns and accidents.

Measuring deterioration — the daily checks, and the periodic checks.

Restoring deterioration — small improvements: replacing what parts he can, and correcting the abnormalities that are urgent; reporting every abnormality and every failure to maintenance promptly; and assisting maintenance when they repair the machine.

All of this prevents the deterioration that use itself causes, through cleaning, lubrication and tightening, together with the daily and periodic checks. The operator handles the deterioration he can reach himself; the larger items remain maintenance’s responsibility.

2. The maintenance department’s role

• Maintenance’s original work — bringing knowledge and capability beyond the operator’s to periodic, preventive and corrective maintenance, in order to measure deterioration and restore it
• Supporting autonomous maintenance — teaching and training operators in the construction and function of parts, in lubrication and lubrication standards, in inspection methods and inspection standards; responding quickly when an abnormality is reported; and providing the technology to diagnose the machine
• Researching and developing maintenance technology, and setting the maintenance standards
• Recording maintenance data so that it becomes usable maintenance information
• Investigating how to analyse failures, and finding the way to prevent them
• Working with engineering and development so that machines are designed with maintenance in mind
• Controlling spare parts, production aids, and technical information

The seven steps of autonomous maintenance

Autonomous maintenance runs in seven steps. All of them begin from understanding the idea, why it matters, and why it has to be done at all.

Steps 1 to 3 change the machine. Steps 4 and 5 change the behaviour of people. Steps 6 and 7 change the working environment.

Autonomous maintenance is the operator changing his own machine, then changing his own behaviour, and in the end being able to change the maintenance environment itself — with the maintenance department supporting him at every step.

Read next

• Autonomous Maintenance: CLAIR and the Seven Steps That Actually Work

Reference

• ธานี อ่วมอ้อ. การบำรุงรักษาด้วยตนเอง. กรุงเทพฯ: สถาบันเพิ่มผลผลิตแห่งชาติ, 2547.
• ธานี อ่วมอ้อ. การบำรุงรักษาทวีผลแบบทุกคนมีส่วนร่วม. พิมพ์ครั้งที่ 2. กรุงเทพฯ: สถาบันเพิ่มผลผลิตแห่งชาติ, 2546.
• Development Program: Implementing Total Productive Maintenance. Tokyo: Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance, 1996.