The pillars of total productive maintenance
The pillars of total productive maintenance are autonomous maintenance, planned maintenance, quality maintenance, focused improvement, training and education, safety, health and environment, total productive maintenance on administration and early equipment management.
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Autonomous maintenance gives the hand operators the responsibility of carrying out and supervising routine maintenance activities such as inspections, cleaning and lubrication. The pillar is essential as it enhances the knowledge of operators with regards to the equipment that they utilize, give them ownership pf the equipment they operate, eliminate the risks and machine failure associated with low equipment maintenance, maintains equipment in good working condition and enables maintenance personnel focus on higher-level activities.
Planned maintenance is a total maintenance pillar that enables the scheduling of maintenance activities based on predetermined failure rates. Planned maintenance is a vital practice as it reduces cases of unscheduled downtimes, enables maintenance activities to be scheduled at times when the production plant is not running and eliminates the inventory costs such as failure due to wear and tear.
Quality maintenance allows the design of early error detection and prevention in the existing production processes and uses the root cause analysis framework to eliminate recurring quality defects. The pillar is significant as it seeks to eliminate quality defects in projects by analysis their root causes to improve the quality of projects, reduces the cost of detecting and correcting defects at later stages and reduces the overall number of defects in systems.
Focused improvement encourages teamwork among groups of employees to attain regular and continual improvement in the operation of equipment. The pillar enables cross-functional teams to detect and resolve recurrent issues and makes use of diverse talent in the company to achieve continuous improvement.
Training and education seek to fill existing knowledge gaps for the company to attain the goals of total productive maintenance. Training and education are essential to plant operators, maintenance teams and managers. The pillar is essential as it enables operators to enhance their skills by carrying out maintenance of their equipment and identifying problems. Maintenance personnel make use of training and education to learn new methods for preventive maintenance activities. The training offered to managers exposes them to total productive maintenance principles, employee development and coaching.
Safety, health and environment is a pillar that ensures the maintenance of a safe and healthy environment at the workplace setting. The pillar eliminates the possible safety and health risks giving rise to a safe working environment and eliminates workplace accidents.
The total productive maintenance on administration pillar focuses on the application of the framework in administrative functions. The pillar is essential as it supports the production activities such as procurement, scheduling and order processing, extends total productive maintenance benefits beyond the plant floor and eliminates wastes in the administration processes.
Early equipment management seeks to improve the design of new machines and equipment by directing knowledge and understanding the manufacturing process of existing equipment. The pillar is crucial as it enables faster attainment of planned performance levels due to fewer startup issues and results in robust and simple maintenance tasks.