TPM is structural work that needs the whole organisation, changing the atmosphere in which machines are worked with. For every department to be able to play its part, the skill of every employee in operating and maintaining equipment is a necessity.
But campaigns to instil the TPM mindset — to get the operator to think “it is our machine, we must look after it” — run into a problem: the operator has no technical knowledge, no grounding in how the machine was designed, and no management knowledge.
If TPM is to keep producing results, developing operating and maintenance skill is unavoidable. It often fails, though, when an organisation cannot find an approach that suits its own particular capabilities, relationships and way of working.
OJT and OFF-JT
Training comes in two forms: on-the-job training, where the learner is taken to the real place of work, and off-the-job training, in a classroom or from other sources. Both rest on improving the individual’s skill, so that the company’s production efficiency improves through work done correctly and with practised competence.
Whichever form it takes, it is management and the line supervisors who are responsible for creating an atmosphere of learning, on these two headings.
- Building skill in caring for the machine
- Building skill in doing the work
What skill means, and the order in which it appears
Skill generally means the ability to do the work: to do it accurately, and to respond quickly — without needing a long analysis — to whatever happens, using knowledge and experience.
Whoever takes less time to detect an abnormality and find the fix has more skill than whoever takes longer at the same task. People do acquire skill automatically, given enough experience and enough chance to get it wrong. But waiting for that takes a long time and cannot be controlled, because it depends mainly on the individual.
So developing skill here means giving education and training in order to shorten the time before skill appears — rather than relying on experience alone.
The five stages of skill
Skill develops from knowing nothing and having no experience of the thing at all, through to being able to teach it:
- Stage 1 — neither theory nor skill; no training and no practice yet
- Stage 2 — theory only; beginning to work
- Stage 3 — skill; applying the theory to the work
- Stage 4 — new theory, drawn out of the practice
- Stage 5 — advanced skill, able to teach others; the new theory applied back into the skill
Why this pillar is necessary
Knowledge management matters a great deal in TPM: creating knowledge, accumulating it, spreading it, and keeping it with the organisation rather than letting it leave with one individual when that person goes. All of this is one of the pillars of TPM.
The knowledge a TPM programme needs, and the knowledge it produces, is of two kinds. Explicit knowledge is plainly visible and can be handled — ready to be passed to everyone else through documents, manuals and other learning material. Tacit knowledge sits with the person; it has no fixed form and no clarity, and depends entirely on that individual — a special technique, a skill, an expertise.
So the question that matters is how to bring tacit knowledge out into explicit knowledge, and how to have the explicit knowledge you already hold and the knowledge you newly acquire developed and spread across the whole organisation. That is knowledge management in TPM.
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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.