Question

Total Productive Maintenance: Research How TPM increases productivity, reduces manufacturing costs. It can be a target of opportunity to improve manufacturing processes, reduce cost and minimize downtime. Use Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and an example of your choice to illustrate this concept.

Answer 1

TPM or Total productive maintenance is a mechanism to study the entity’s functionality and its relationship to product quality. TPM aims at addressing the likely cause for quality deviations and suggest ways in which the same can be fixed.

The overall objective of TPM is to increase equipment’s effectiveness by improving its productivity and quality adherence.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) = Availability % * Quality % * Performance %

A regular TPM regime encourages the employee to take ownership of his equipment. The employee looks after the maintenance and quality adherence of his machine, thereby reducing defects and increasing production uptime. This in turn, increases the OEE of the overall system.