Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
"I hadn't really intended to introduce Total
Productive Maintenance (TPM), in fact I didn't even know
that's what it was at that time, it simply happened as a
by-product of another project" recounts Paul Wilson,
Managing Director of Aster Training about his early days working
as a Production Manager in the north east of England for an
electronics company in the 1980's.
"I had been given the project of implementing one man/two
machines into a unionised facility across a 24/7 shift
operation."
My focus had been largely taken up with negotiations with the
trade unions to try and improve our productivity as a business.
Like most companies at that time we were starting to compete
with lower cost geographies and we needed as many advantages as
possible.
We looked first to reduce our fixed & variable costs, and then
looked at ways of improving output per operator and then finally
how to improve the up-time of aging assembly equipment which
needed both electronic and mechanical skills to maintain.
One of the ideas that came out of our discussions was the
introduction of what we called 'Technical Operators'- machine
operators who were fully trained and capable of carrying out the
first line maintenance and change over procedures which had
previously been carried out by skilled maintenance
technicians.
Six months later after an initial training period supervised by
our Senior Maintenance Technician, we had our first team of
qualified Technical Operators. Within a short space of time the
results were there for all to see.
Jobs that had traditionally been done by skilled technicians
were routinely being done by machine operators. These included
tasks such as lubrication, basic machine programming, machine
set up and change-over. One of the major benefits we derived
came from the fact that machines were being attended to on the
majority of occasions straight away rather than having to wait
for the next available maintenance technician to address the
problem.
Both operators and maintenance guys perceived benefits:-
The operators no longer had to wait for maintenance technicians
for trivial little problems.
The maintenance guys were no longer required to complete tasks
that they considered boring and mundane.
We worked hard at alleviating any fear the maintenance
technicians might have had that their jobs were under threat and
this soon evaporated once we were challenging them with more
interesting projects.
At that time we had no appreciation of industry standard
measures such as OEE but it turned out later we had improved our
performance from about 35% to in excess of 75% in as little as
12 months.
Of course the story does not end here; we were starting out on
our journey towards autonomous maintenance.
Our maintenance technicians relieved to be rid of their mundane
tasks were now given specific projects working with the
production staff to cut out some of the 6 big losses.
The machine set up routines were looked at, new purpose-made
jigs were constructed to allow production to carry out change
overs without the need for all of the 'tweaks' and 'alignment'
that had previously plagued this process.
The major parts of the machines prone to wear and tear were put
onto a predictive maintenance schedule and their spares managed
on a min/max routine. In fact, we were even able to sell back
some spares to the machine manufacturers which had been
previously been bought as an 'insurance policy'. The
cleanliness and reliability of machines improved significantly
as operators took on a series of daily, weekly and monthly
'fitness checks'. We encouraged the operators to feel ownership
of their machines and to treat them as their own, something that
would have been an alien concept only six months before.
Looking back now these were very exciting times, we didn't at
the time understand we were introducing a TPM culture and we
learnt by making mistakes as we went along, but what a learning
ground, I wouldn't have swapped it for the world".
For further information contact:-
Paul Wilson
Managing Director
Aster Training a corporate training
company
www.aster-training.co.uk
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