TPM in Office

Who owns itManagers and staff in sales and administration

What it targetsRemove the losses that come from coordination between departments, and support production

What the job isAutonomous maintenance in the office: clean the office equipment · make the work process efficient · standardise it · adjust the attitude to “whatever production needs, we do” · Focused improvement: cut the time accounting work takes · improve the delivery system · improve purchasing and contracting

Departments that do not produce directly — administration, R&D, purchasing — should be supporting production, and they do it by applying TPM thinking to their own work to remove office losses.

Office TPM rests on five pillars: individual improvement, autonomous maintenance, education and training, a system for assigning work, and a system for evaluating it.

It also needs units of measure, success indicators and acceptable standard values, so that progress can be followed.

1. The role of administration and support work

Departments that do not produce directly still matter a great deal to production: coordination, preparing documents, purchasing. If that administrative and support work is slow and inefficient — which is to say, if it contains loss — then production, the department that actually earns the company’s money, cannot run smoothly.

Office functions also have a duty to improve their own productivity and reduce cost, in line with whatever competitive strategy the company has.

Making TPM easier for the production groups to carry out
Reducing the losses that occur in office work

2. Productivity in the office

Office productivity is raising output — improving quality and management — and reducing what goes in, meaning loss and waste. Raising output covers better decision-making, better working methods, a better image for the company, and a better workplace. Reducing input means making resources go further: lower office costs, less labour, simpler work, and better-quality coordination.

3. Losses in the office

Office waste comes from three places: the decision-making process, the coordination process, and the work of producing documents and processing information.

Why this pillar is necessary

It is often found that the office’s own processes play a part in reducing production efficiency — leaving a machine stopped for a long time, for instance, because purchasing, contracting or disbursement takes so long that in the end there is no spare part to be had quickly.

It is also found that office work sometimes has no overall effectiveness measure at all: no measure of the office staff’s own availability, no measure of the performance efficiency of the work process, and no measure of the quality rate of what comes out of it. All of this creates loss that reaches through into production, and stops TPM running in its full form.

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.