1. Introduction to TPM

1.1 Preliminary remark

The goal of almost any company or service provider is the generation of profit in order to secure the company‘s market position, to expand and to fulfill the expectations of shareholders and employees. Even administrations and other organisations pursue a similar purpose by offering a special service on the market and using it successfully. There are certainly additional forms of companies, service providers, administrations and organisations but the main focus of the instruction in this book lies especially on those variations geared toward economic success.

Companies of all kinds are especially successful if they use their resources such as know-how, machinery and equipment, brands and patents and most importantly their employees with the greatest possible efficiency. Consequently, it is essential to utilise and make use of all of the existing potential consistently. Again and again, we see that only a few of the seemingly infinite number of companies in the world stand out for their excellence. Now, how did these companies achieve this special status?

The Business School of London found out through years of study that about a third of the companies taking part in the research achieved excellence in their field.

A company is thereby considered excellent if it achieved world market leadership in at least one line of business in its field. Many companies try to achieve this objective but only those companies that have implemented a production and management system and pursue it consistently, have actually accomplished it. Among the most successful production and management systems, TPM plays an outstanding role.

The main approach of TPM as a management system is the „hunt“ for losses and wastefulness and their effective elimination. TPM as a comprehensive management system offers a proven and tested concept to increase the added value and as a result to improve or maintain the competitiveness and to eventually achieve world-class standard.

1.2 Historical development of TPM

TPM is not among the many new management fads which slosh over companies periodically and promise sensational improvements. In fact, the beginnings of TPM go back more than 50 years (cf. Al-Radhi 2002, p. 103 ff.).

Until about 1950, machines in Japan were not reconditioned until the moment when a malfunction appeared. From 1951 forward preventive maintenance and from 1957 improving maintenance was introduced with the goal of increased performance. From the sixties on TPM has been developed out of the Toyota Production System (TPS) in Japan. The company Nippondenso Corporation Ltd. of the Toyota group had a multitude of problems concerning their productivity and quality as well as difficulties with increasing automation. This was the reason employees in the maintenance department felt overstrained with the multiple malfunctions. The machines caused frequent breakdowns which lead to an efficiency that - compared to other companies - was significantly lower. From 1969 the responsibility for the maintenance was entrusted to the production workers. This formed the foundation of Total Productive Maintenance (cf. Nakajima 1995). Nippondenso, as a member of the Toyota group, has integrated the philosophy of the Toyota Production Systems (TPS) in the advancement of TPM. As a result, some elements of the TPS were

assumed to be given or taken for granted in the development of TPM and so far were not mentioned explicitly with TPM (e.g. the Just-in- Time-principle).

Ultimately, however, the basic concept of TPM came from William Edward Deming and Philip B. Crosby, the American quality philosophers of the 50s. Deming‘s concept served the increase of efficiency and productivity in industrial enterprises. In his home country, though, his ideas found no interest. Hereupon, he introduced his system in Japan. Sense and benefits (quality control, avoidance of losses and thus enhancement of productivity) were appreciated here and implemented consistently for the first time. The employees were trained and familiarised with their machines. All employees were allowed to contribute, to look for losses and to make suggestions for improvements. Particular success was attained when the maintenance staff, thus the experts, instructed their colleagues in the production line. In this way, they were able to understand the operating mode of their machinery better and could then operate it more professionally. Hence, the experts had more time to concentrate on the actual preventive maintenance and respectively to work on a general improvement of the machinery and increase the degree of availability significantly.

The new procedure of Toyota on how to deal with malfunctions was extraordinary. Up to this point, assembly lines were not stopped when a defect occurred and this often lead to problems with several products. From now on, every employee was expected to stop the entire assembly line immediately when a failure occurred and to eliminate the cause of malfunction. For this purpose all qualified employees and operators moved to the location where the failure occurred in order to find the cause.

This was the practical application of the new principle:

Go to Gemba, look for Muda, make Kaizen! This means: Go to the location of the failure, look for the reason (or the waste) and make an improvement immediately!

Only after the reason for the breakdown was eliminated the assembly line could be started again. This increased the pressure to find the cause and to eliminate it quickly and efficiently. The success proved Toyota right, the effects were overwhelming. The line efficiencies, which were initially below 50%, increased to more than 80%. Even today Toyota is at the top of the automotive industry because of this.

Meanwhile, Nissan has caught up with its plant in Sunderland/UK. Furthermore, TPM was influenced by the „old German virtues“, such as punctuality, reliability, orderliness, cleanliness, self-discipline and quality. While these virtues are still cultivated in Japan, they partially got lost in Germany or are just about to be rediscovered.

1.3 The term TPM

The initials TPM stand for many different terminologies in practice, like e. g. „Total Profit Management“ or „Total Personnel Motivation“. The most common and the ones representing the concept of TPM the best are the terms „Total Productive Maintenance“ and „Total Productive Management“. Even if the two mentioned phrases stand for the same concept, or to be more precise, the same philosophy, they still have different characteristics which are identified briefly in the following.

„Total Productive Maintenance“, as it originally was developed by Seiichi Nakajima and introduced in Japan in 1971, placed the productive maintenance with regard to the employees in the centre of attention (cf. Nakajima 1995). The primary concern of the activities was plant effectiveness and the life-time extension of the equipment. This understanding is still prevalent today. Many companies establish Autonomous Maintenance and speak of a TPM implementation. However, this is not correct in the context of the current TPM concept. Even many authors fail to fulfil the complexity of TPM and introduce it as a program for maintenance and management of machines. (cf. e. g. Hartmann 2001).

TPM has been developed continuously by the Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance (JIPM) into a comprehensive Management System over the past 30 years. Today it comprises eight elements or pillars which contribute to all operational departments. In this respect the term „Total Productive Management“ describes the concept of TPM more accurately. Nonetheless, the use of the term „Total Productive Maintenance“ is still justifiable if „Maintenance“ is understood as „Sustainment“ , thus TPM in terms of comprehensive measures to maintain productivity.

1.4 The objectives of TPM

If TPM is understood as a comprehensive management system for the enhancement of a company‘s or organisation‘s competitiveness, it is necessary to define the objectives of TPM clearly. Each management system has to pursue defined goals, otherwise it is difficult to explain the significance to management and staff. As TPM, as already mentioned, is of very complex nature, goals assist in reducing complexity and in classifying them into understandable units. That being said, TPM pursues the following five objectives:

• TPM aims at the establishment of an appropriate corporate and working culture, to improve the efficiency within production and all other departments constantly and sustainably.
• TPM establishes a superior system in order to recognize and avoid all losses and wastes, like accidents, failures and malfunctions of all kinds, whereas all activities are continuously directed on location and directly focused on discrepancies.
• With this TPM established a continuous improvement process that comprises all departments like development, production, sales and administration.
• TPM achieves the implementation of the continuous improvement process with the objective to eliminate all losses and wastes mainly by establishing cross-functional teamwork - wherever possible - in companies.
• TPM mobilises the complete knowledge and skills of all employees and therefore requires the comprehensive engagement of all those who are affected and...