Today, as many of our clients' firms are growing, they are continuing to look for ways to get the maximum benefit from their existing equipment.  The purchase of new equipment leads to an increase in capital investment, utility and space requirements and, often, the necessity of a costly facilities expansion.  To alleviate the situation, many firms are considering the use of Total Productive Manufacturing principals throughout their organization.
 
Total Productive Manufacturing, often referred to as TPM, is a teamwork approach for solving equipment and workplace-related problems.  It's an important concept since its adoption can dramatically improve a company's production capacity and flexibility to meet changing market needs.  In a nutshell, TPM is about getting the most out of your available resources and making sure that they are always available for use.
 
A helpful way to look at resource capacity is in terms of OEE or Overall Equipment Effectiveness.  OEE represents the capacity of production equipment as compared to its theoretical potential, and it is calculated by using the following formula:
 
(availability rate) X (performance rate) X (quality rate)  
 
If, for example, an assembly machine is available 80% of the time, only runs at 85% of its designed speed and produces 95% quality, the OEE would be 64.6%.  Although each loss may appear reasonable by itself, the overall production loss can be huge.  The goal of

1. Measure your current performance and analyze production losses.
2. Develop an improvement plan to eliminate the major losses identified:
• Equipment based losses - maintenance and technical.
• Management losses - coordination, business process ineffectiveness.
• Process losses - scrap, yield, rework, process capability.
3. Improvement activities could include:
• Autonomous operator maintenance programs.
• Equipment improvement activities.
• Quality maintenance.
• Maintenance prevention systems development.
• Education and training.
4. Review losses periodically and address in priority order.
5. Standardize best-practice operations by involving operators in daily maintenance activities.
6. Review and improve planned preventive maintenance.
7. Strive for continuous improvement.

• Commitment from management is key to success of any TPM program.
• TPM is a people-orientated approach.  For this reason, training and team building is a necessary part of any TPM implementation effort.
• The focus of TPM activities should be on bottleneck or constraining operations (see TOC article in January 2006 newsletter).
• TPM requires an attention to detail and root-cause analysis of problems.  Consider training on problem-solving techniques as part of the program design.

Next Steps:

If you are interested in learning more about this tool and how Epicenter can help your organization to become more effective, please do not hesitate to e-mail us at rmilicia@epicentergroup.com or call Robin Milicia at (216) 534-7581.