TPM Assessment

Focus-group and individual interviews, observation on the floor, and performance analysis to establish readiness before TPM begins.

The assessment does not begin with documents. It begins by walking the floor across every shift, nights included, because most of what stops a machine happens when management is not in the building. It then works through interviews — operators, supervisors, maintenance technicians and the plant manager — in groups and individually.

What the assessment has to produce is not a score but three answers: whether the plant is ready for TPM at all, where the largest loss actually sits, and which machine to start on if work begins tomorrow. The report is therefore an ordered list of what to do first — not a catalogue of faults so long that nobody starts.

What this step covers

• Assess the TPM organisation as a whole
• Assess how past training bears on TPM
• Assess the level of support from top management
• Assess how previous training topics connect to TPM
• Assess communication within the organisation, between departments and inside them, as it affects TPM
• Assess the quality of the environment and of safety at work
• Assess the working relationship between production and maintenance
• Assess how far the daily-paid staff accept TPM
• Establish a system for measuring basic maintenance performance
• Analyse the weaknesses in maintenance management that need improving urgently
• Analyse the strengths that will help TPM along
• Analyse the problems likely to arise once TPM begins
• Draw up the plan for carrying out TPM

What you receive

Assessment report and recommendations

Why assess before starting

Most plants whose TPM programme fails did not fail because the method was wrong. They failed because they started in the wrong place — on a machine that was never the bottleneck, across the whole plant at once so nobody could support it, or while production and maintenance were still not speaking.

The assessment works like a diagnosis before treatment. What it looks for is not anyone’s fault but three gaps: between what management believes happens and what happens on the floor, between what the data records and what is actually being lost, and between production and maintenance.

How to apply it on the floor

1. Have whatever production and downtime history exists — it does not need tidying first
2. Give access to the floor on every shift, nights included
3. Make time for interviews from operator up to plant manager

The mistakes we see most

• Tidying the area before the assessment, which hides what a normal day looks like
• Allowing only the day shift, which hides the problems that happen at night

Common questions