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TPM Today

I don’t want to make anyone angry. But I have some things to say about our productive efforts that might be shocking or rude. This is not personal. The commentaries might not even be true for your organization. If that is the case, please sit back and enjoy the discussion about how others miss opportunities and make mistakes. Of course, maybe a little of the discussion might be true for your organization.

Part of the problem was written almost 500 years ago: “Small problems are difficult to see but easy to fix. However, when you let these problems develop, they are easy to see but very difficult to fix.” Machiavelli, Principe (1530)

Another part of the problem is complacency. The techniques we use to produce useful outcomes — such as product production, transportation, or processes — are not perfect. Many developed organically without a master plan or even a road map. Some of them are not even good; the most we can say is that they kind of work. We have to awaken to the challenge (to quote the 14 points of W. E. Deming).

At its very core, TPM shouts wake up! The era of workers dulled into sleeping zombie-like automatons is over. The era of insulated and insular management is over. Now even the most modest line workers have to solve problems, go outside their comfort zones, do maintenance tasks, and work to eliminate waste. Even the most stalwart unions have to break from their own past and embrace the idea that the enemy is in the marketplace, not in the executive suite.

Every manager has to use all the capabilities of all their people to reduce waste, improve reliability and quality, and improve safety. The people to solve problems and be mind workers have been downsized, liquidated or will be soon. What we’re left with are the workers, a few managers, and fewer staff positions.

Of course, operators are busy. Everyone in the company is busy. The issue is what is the highest value-added activity they can be doing? In many cases, the highest value-added activity is TPM activity. The same issue can be said for downtime. In some cases, additional downtime has a high return on investment such as when it reduces emergency downtime of an equal or greater duration.

Let’s face it: the name TPM confused everyone (me too). What a great idea — let’s work hard to make maintenance more productive. Logically everyone wants maintenance that is totally productive. Raise your hand if you want partially productive maintenance!

In a Japanese auto assembly plant, the name makes complete sense. Maintenance is done mostly on the line by contractors (big jobs) or line workers (small jobs). They have only a small maintenance department. In the western world, with actual maintenance departments and sometimes with union rules forbidding operators from using tools to make repairs, the name means something entirely different. If we could go back in time, we might have named it ODI (Operator Driven Improvement), ODR (Operator Driven Reliability), or TYI (Tag, you’re it). But we are left with a particularly tough and confusing name.

It might seem funny, but one resistance to TPM comes from the fact it was not invented here (meaning in the West). Some firms resist ideas that are not invented by their company, industry, or country.

TPM has a hidden heart. TPM has a great cover story of moving hours for basic maintenance from operations to maintenance. In our zeal, we have confused the cover of the book with the heart of the book. The cover says TPM moves maintenance tasks to operations. If we go deep inside the book, we realize TPM is less about moving maintenance tasks to operations (as useful as this transfer is) than it is about creating a new accountability for useful output and machine health for operators.

TPM says everyone is involved. Management interprets that as “let’s delegate this TPM to maintenance or operations,” when, in fact, management is the stick stuck in the ground and will have to change. The change starts by funding and supporting the transition from the workforce as it is to a workforce that is trained (skills, knowledge), empowered, and motivated. It proceeds with managers getting out of the way of the empowered, trained, and motivated workers they helped create. TPM has to overcome the natural conservatism (and laziness) of management. As many shop floor problems (in the trenches) flow from the fear of change as flow from a love for the status quo.

Where we started

For years I’ve said that TPM does not apply to most North American and European manufacturing facilities. If you follow the original prescriptions as laid out in TPM Development Program and TPM Introduction to TPM by Seiichi Nakajima (1982 in Japanese and 1989 in English, see reference section for details), you will be overwhelmed by the details. That system required charts, displays, detailed flow charts, and an excessive amount of manual record keeping.

The second issue was the overt hostility of TPM to maintenance as a department or profession. In its Japanese incarnation, maintenance is relegated not to the back seat, but to walking behind the car. In a complex, dangerous, mission critical process plant, you want your varsity team doing maintenance — not the intramural team, no matter how great their intentions.

The third issue that was never addressed in the original design was how to interface the TPM activity with the CMMS (computerized maintenance management system). After all, the CMMS is where all the maintenance and repair data is supposed to be kept. Do you issue work orders for the daily TPM work, for the minor repairs, or for the TPM meetings? The Japanese TPM effort took off well before CMMS became so big; therefore, the interface between the two was never discussed in the literature.

The fourth issue was the cultural difference and practical difference between typical Japanese and western companies. In Japanese companies of that era, workers were hired as a class (like the class of 2009). The members of that class periodically moved around to different jobs within the plant. They gained a wide view of their process and had experience both upstream and downstream from where they were assigned this period. The worker was used to being a generalist and quickly adapted to responsibilities of a traditional TPM environment.

In Western plants, people usually stayed in the department in which they were hired. It is uncommon (though certainly not unknown) for people to move between departments. They become specialists in whatever area they ended up. Asking operators to take on even basic maintenance tasks is asking a lot.

Well, what changed?

The economic dislocation of 2008–2009 is what happened. For manufacturing to survive in the West, something had to give. China and the Far East had the advantage of low labor rates and the advantage of seemingly endless supplies of workers. At some point, these workers would demand better wages, but now winning a head-to-head competition was impossible.

In reaction, Western companies were busy cutting costs. Some cut deeply into the muscle of maintenance and other areas. Remember that, in most western businesses, maintenance provides capacity; without the maintenance effort, capacity gradually becomes less reliable, quality varies, and the customer experience suffers.

My colleague at the University of Alabama, Dr. Mark Goldstein, is extremely concerned by this trend. He told me in a recent conversation, “More customers are being lost due to equipment reliability problems than to quality issues. Today, too many companies are losing valued customers because, in their rush to service increasing customer demand, their management overlooked the fact that Just-In-Time delivery depends on full plant equipment availability. Simply, availability is dependent on companies maintaining full plant equipment capacity! Too many senior company executives overlooked their responsibility to strengthen their maintenance knowledge and activity. The result: Customer Loss!”

All products are a child of someone’s mind. The processes to produce them are thoughts converted into action. The mind can think of different ways of producing products with different reliances on labor, tooling, and materials. The only way to win the challenge against low labor rates is to outthink the competitor to make labor a smaller part of the equation. To outthink the competitor, you need to harness the intellect of everyone in the company from the CEO to the janitor.

Some people in operations are offended by the following indictment. This indictment is a condition that all humans in all jobs face. One way to engage the minds of the operations group is to wake them up! Most of the shop floor programs for the last 30 years were attempts to wake people up and keep them awake (e.g., TQM, Quality Circles, SPC, Six Sigma).

One wakeup call (first cousin to TPM) is Lean Maintenance. In Lean we attack all the sources of waste. One big source of waste is having maintenance people travel to the assets for short-duration basic maintenance tasks. It is wasteful of their skills as well as intrinsically wasteful when there is already someone there capable of doing the tasks — the operator. After training, operators are ready (possibly not yet willing) and able to do these tasks. Once the operators have been inside the machine, it becomes theirs. For many people, once it is theirs they wake up.

That is the beginning of the shift, but only the beginning. The same shift comes from management. They have to listen and invest real money in the ideas and proposals of the rank and file.

Their listening and investment leads to the second change needed, addressing the enormous waste in production and operations itself. Newly integrated operators could serve as the waste police officers for the whole production effort (I use production in the widest sense). Success requires a radical change in management’s view of the workers and, even tougher, a radical change in the way the workers views their own role.

It is this second part of the shift that is exciting. I believe it is also what the Japanese gurus of the last era meant by the program in the first place, but was obscured but the absorption of TPM into maintenance programs by maintenance consultants. Mea culpa on that score.

The advantages of TPM go well beyond the normal interests of maintenance. The concentration on all the losses proves that. TPM belongs in the production/operations bookstore, not the maintenance bookstore. It is a production/operations effort as much as Lean manufacturing, Total Quality, or any other company-wide production program.