Executive summary
- Production TPM is phase one and must succeed before company-wide TPM begins.
- Its goals are zero breakdown, zero defect and zero accident, delivered by five pillars.
- Company-wide TPM adds Quality Maintenance, TPM in Office, and Safety, Hygiene and Working Environment.
- The sequence that works: focused improvement and autonomous maintenance first, then planned maintenance.
- A pillar with no floor-level evidence exists only on the organisation chart.
TPM is usually introduced to a plant as a diagram: columns standing on a foundation. The diagram is accurate but misleading, because it implies the pillars are built simultaneously and independently. In practice they are sequenced, they depend on one another, and at least three are commonly implemented in name only.
Production TPM: the five pillars
Production TPM is TPM applied inside production. It is the first phase and must succeed before TPM can go company-wide. Its ultimate goals are zero breakdown, zero defect and zero accident.
| Pillar | What it delivers | Floor test |
|---|---|---|
| Individual Improvement (Kobetsu Kaizen) | Cross-functional teams attacking quantified losses. The engine of the whole system. | Every active project should trace to a named loss on the loss tree, with a currency value. |
| Autonomous Maintenance (Jishu Hozen) | Operators own the basic condition of their equipment through CLAIR. | Ask an operator to show their cleaning-inspection-lubrication standard and their last three abnormality tags. |
| Planned Maintenance | Maintenance shifts from reactive dispatch to criticality-driven scheduled work. | Ask for PM compliance over the last twelve weeks and the top five failure modes by hours. |
| Operation & Maintenance Skill Development | A skills matrix per role and asset, and knowledge management (TPM-KM). | Pick a critical asset: how many operators per shift are certified to level 3 on it? |
| Initial Phase Management | Lessons from existing assets fed into the design, purchase and commissioning of new ones. | Does the last equipment specification contain requirements written by maintenance and operators? |
Company-wide TPM: the three additional pillars
Company-wide TPM extends the scope from production to every operating unit, targeting company performance: Quality, Cost, Delivery, Safety, Morale and Environment.
- Quality Maintenance Create conditions in which defects cannot occur — from product planning and design, through production technology and manufacturing, to the final scanning that stops defects reaching the customer. This is the pillar that owns zero defect.
- TPM in Office Office processes reduce production efficiency — slow purchasing leaves machines without spare parts. This pillar measures white-collar availability, process performance efficiency and quality rate for office work.
- Safety, Hygiene and Working Environment Zero accidents as a design objective, integrated into the same standards and audits as everything else rather than run as a parallel programme.
A note on scale
Deploy on one model line first. A plant-wide launch across twelve lines with the same resources produces twelve shallow implementations, all of which decay. One deep implementation creates the internal trainers who make the rollout possible.
Activities that run alongside
TPM often needs supporting activities: 5S, visual control, Poka-Yoke mistake-proofing and industrial engineering techniques. All of them reduce waste in the production process, which is another route toward waste-free production.