The seriousness of top management is the single most important factor in the success of TPM — seriousness in policy, seriousness in action, and seriousness in support.
Besides management’s seriousness, another factor that makes TPM succeed is holding a competition between the autonomous maintenance groups. This draws people into the activity of itself, drawing on the human instinct to win, with rewards of various kinds in return.
Measuring the results and effects of TPM is the factor that lets you know where the work stands — a prompt as to whether TPM is succeeding, and in what way, so that a plan for putting it right can be found.
Top-management commitment
Top management must give TPM weight in company policy, announcing the policy and announcing the appointment of the working committee — not treating TPM merely as a project or an activity for one period, following a fashion.
Beyond giving it weight in policy, top management must be seen to act on it in earnest — presiding at the opening ceremony, giving time to walking the production lines to ask after progress or obstacles — so as to build the confidence of the people in the organisation.
Support of every kind is a further thing top management must be serious about — support in the form of opportunities to learn, support in resources, and above all support in budget.
A TPM programme whose management merely wants to do it and wants to admire the success, but is not serious about carrying it out in policy, in practice and in support, will be a TPM programme that succeeds only with difficulty — or, one might almost say, a TPM programme that has no way of truly succeeding at all.
TPM small-group activity
One important characteristic of TPM is that employees of every department work in small groups whose leaders’ roles and duties overlap between levels, so that two-way communication between management and the shop floor — top-down and bottom-up — works effectively.
The small groups divide into company level, plant level, division level, department level and operating level, each level having different duties.
The small group at operating level is the group of machine operators carrying out autonomous maintenance. It is the most important group of all, and the one that must be drawn into carrying on TPM continuously and developing further. Holding a competition between the autonomous maintenance groups is one way of creating that motivation.
Small-group activity creates effective communication from policy down to the people doing the work, and from those people up into the setting of policy. It is also another way of drawing employees in, when joined to the human instinct to win.
Measuring the results and effects of TPM
Measurement must be divided into measuring success in carrying the work out, and measuring the outcome of that work as it bears on the performance of the organisation. Measuring success in carrying it out divides into how well the small groups discharge their duties at plant level, division level, department level and AM group level.
Measuring the performance of the organisation is, in fact, measuring how well the company-level small group discharges its duties — since that group is taken to be the one overseeing the organisation as a whole.
The one thing that can tell us how TPM is going, whether it is on the right road, and how much it is achieving, is measuring at intervals — so as to know the progress, to stop and review, or to adjust the plan for what follows.