TPM or Total Productive Maintenance is a companywide maintenance philosophy, supported by interlocking strategies, to maximize equipment effectiveness and eliminate equipment-related waste. "Waaaaaittttttt! What? That's the same answer from 25 years ago. You're telling me that TPM has not changed over all of these years?" Well, the answer to that question is both 'Yes' and 'No'. Yes, TPM is changing, because technology like Leading2Lean's CloudDispatch has given Operators, Mechanics, and Engineers, the digital tools to manage TPM in a whole new and different way. But, 'No' because the principles are still the same regardless of how you manage the system. 

In this article, we are going to show how TPM is executed in the Leading2Lean CloudDispatch software. We will give you a step-by-step approach and show how all of the pillars of TPM are woven into the L2L software. But first, let's set some foundational understanding of TPM. It is important to understand a little history here to show how TPM became such a big part of the industry and how the terms and practices came about.

Let's start with the term Total Productive Maintenance or TPM. The word Total indicates a very large program or effort from the maintenance department. But in reality, the word Total in this context means ALL departments and functions of the business. It is simple to understand if you pose the question, "What would happen to your business if we made the decision not to use production machines?" The answer is clear, every department would suffer because the means of creating profit (the transformation of raw material into a sellable product) would be stopped. If the product is not flowing to the customer, then nobody has a job. Therefore, everyone in the business has skin in the game with regards to the equipment running properly.

We can see how TPM incorporates all aspects of the production process by simply looking at the titles of what is known as the Pillars of TPM.

These Pillars are:

Autonomous Maintenance or Operator Based Maintenance
Focused Improvement
Planned Maintenance
Quality Management
Early Equipment Management
Education and Training
Administrative and Office TPM
Environmental Health & Safety
In the following lessons, we will take a look at each of these Pillars in great detail and additionally walk through each step of implementing the TPM workflows into L2L.

Six Big Losses

For each and every piece of production equipment, there are Six basic types of losses that can be categorized as follows.

These are known as the Six Big Losses.

Failure
Setup/Changeovers and Adjustments
Idling and Minor Stoppages
Reduced Speed
Defects and Rework
Startup Loss

Failure

Failures or more commonly known as Breakdowns are the most well-known, but not necessarily the most abundant, of all of the Six Big Losses. Although a breakdown is the most visual portion of the failure process, it is only the small visual portion of an overall systemic failure that led to downtime in your factory. We will discuss this more in-depth during the Zero-Failure Principle lesson.

Setup/Changeovers and Adjustments

Changeovers are a controversial subject when it comes to counting loss. Some companies, or more often individual plants, like to call a changeover a planned event. In these lessons, we will consider Changeovers a loss and set the system to capture as such. The adjustments that come along with getting the line running after a changeover should be counted along with the Changeover.

Idling and Minor Stops

These types of loss (captured as Operator Fixes in L2L) are small events that happen multiple times in a work-day and are often overlooked as some of the most abundant and important losses in the failure process. These losses are often the greatest drain on operator morale because they impact their day and often are not focused on by the upper levels of management.

Reduced Speed

As the title says, Reduced Speed loss is a loss suffered when the output of the production equipment is slowed or hampered by performance issues. Reduced speed losses are those that occur from the loss of cycle-time performance. This loss can only be measured by tracking the reduction from the designed cycle-time.

Defects and Rework

Defects and Rework are probably the second highest-profile loss. This is often due to the fact that in most cases, we are throwing actual products and raw goods into the trash. This usually quickly catches the attention of upper management. A simple way to understand this loss is to see that we used all of the resources in the facility to produce something that did not bring a cent of profit.

Startup Loss

Startup loss is the loss suffered during the startup of the production line. In many industries and processes, there is time wasted getting machinery up to speed or product into spec following the Startup after an extended shutdown such as the start of shift. There are situations when 100's if not 1000's of pounds, pieces, and products are thrown away before good product is produced.

Zero Failure Principle

Please refer to this brief video.

Reactive v. Proactive Maintenance

Reactive Maintenance is just what it sounds like, the reaction to an unplanned event on a piece of equipment. Reactive maintenance can come in many forms that are not taken into account when building a reactive maintenance process. Yes, I said a reactive maintenance process.

One great mistake made by maintenance departments all around the world is that they do not "plan" for reactive maintenance. Much like any other processes in your business, Reactive Maintenance contains waste. If we do not take the time to identify those wastes, then we are bound by all of the same downfalls that come from wasted time and motion in the production process. We will get into this topic much deeper in the Planning & Scheduling section of this article, but for now, there are a couple of key points to be made.

Planned Maintenance Waste

Reactive maintenance waste not only happens when unplanned downtime occurs, but Reactive Maintenance waste can happen when, in the middle of a Planned Maintenance event, the technician goes off script and decides to repair something in addition to what is planned. In this scenario, all of the waste that comes with a reactive call happens as well. Reactive activity and waste such as no parts, unplanned downtime, proper documentation, etc. all come into play. Again, we will cover this topic in greater detail later.

The goals and aspirations of a good TPM program should be to ultimately create Uptime for the factory. But, in doing so, the best way to achieve this is to create a lean maintenance program that continues to eliminate waste. By doing so, maintenance teams can focus on the important aspects of keeping the equipment running.

Support Organizations Role

In many organizations the role of maintaining equipment is the last thing on the minds of support departments such as HR, Training, Sales and Marketing as a few examples. But as stated above in the opening paragraphs, nothing could be farther from the truth. Each department in the company has, in some way or another, a direct impact on the performance of the equipment.

Let's take Human Resources as our example. Our current culture in manufacturing, or any business that depends on the skilled trades for that matter, is in a constant search for well trained, highly skilled trades people like maintenance personnel. Understanding their role as a part of a greater TPM program, HR may very well change the way the HR representative looks at their responsibility to hire and train new mechanics for the shop-floor. Similar examples can be made for how Product Design groups design products with ease of production and maintenance in mind, or how Purchasing departments can have a greater impact on uptime in the parts they buy and stock and so on. Critical is everyone's understanding of how each department depends on well maintained properly functioning equipment to make the company profitable.

• Description: This setting is used to describe the dispatch type. It's best to be very specific.
  
  • example: Code Red - Machine down not producing
  • example: Code Yellow - Machine running at reduced capacity
• Color: This setting is used to set the background color of Dispatch Type field on the main dispatch screen.
• Code: This setting is used to set the 'Dispatch Type' code. Note: cannot be edited once saved.
• Active: Green means the Dispatch Type is Active. Clicking on the green button will turn it grey inactivating it.
• Impact to Production: This setting is used to select the Dispatch Types impact to production (Down, Impacting, Planned and No Impact). Note: Down Impact effects OA, OEE and Downtime totals on production dashboards and reports.
• Set Display Priority for Dispatch Types on Main Screen: This setting is used to set the sort order when sorting the dispatch type column from the main dispatch screen.

Create Dispatch Settings

• Start Down Time When Resource is Dispatched: This setting is used for special situations where machine downtime may not start until the time a resource(s) have actively started working on the issue. Check this box when response time does not impact machine availability.
  • In each of these cases, the line or machine continues to run until the time that it is taken out of production to correct the problem
  • It should be noted that if no one is dispatched, the system overlooks the count downtime from the time someone is dispatched and counts the dispatch as the time from when it was created to closed. 
  • For scheduled dispatch events that launch hours or days prior to the actual time of action and response time have no impact on machine availability.
• Allow Only One Dispatch per Machine Open Simultaneously: This setting is used to limit 1 critical Dispatch Type against a machine at any given time. If this option is selected and the machine already has open dispatch of the same type operator will receive "Machine is Already Down for Critical Dispatch Type". This setting essentially marks the Dispatch Type as critical.
• Available for Selection in New Dispatch Screen: Disabling this setting would remove the Dispatch Type from being selected in the New Dispatch Screen.

View Dispatch Settings

• Flag Dispatcher Until Dispatched: This setting is used to flag the dispatcher with visual and audible signal when a new dispatch has been submitted. Note: not typically used for sites self-dispatching.
• Display Lines Downtime Cost on Dispatch Screen: This setting is used to display the cost of downtime on each dispatch on the main screen.
• Highlight on Critical Machine: This setting sets the dispatch screen background color to a hot pink color when dispatch type is selected for a critical machine.

Edit Dispatch Settings

• Users cannot add or remove documents from Dispatches: With this setting enabled, only an Administrator can add or remove documents within a Dispatch.
• Allow a Resource to be dispatched to multiple Dispatches of this Type simultaneously: With this setting enabled, a resource can be working on more than one call at a time.  Note: If you plan on tracking resource utilization DO NOT CHECK THIS BOX!!!! Allowing resources to be on multiple events at same time will multiply their man-hours and give an incorrect view of how much time is being allocated.
• Enable Spares, Attached Tooling, Reason Codes, External Costs, Action & Component Codes, and  Why Codes: These default to ON. With the setting disabled, the section for the corresponding name will not appear within the Dispatch.
•     

Complete Dispatch Settings

• Automatically Launch Follow Up Dispatches on Completion: When a dispatch is completed (not closed), and a follow up dispatch type is specified in the dispatch type setup, launch a new dispatch as a follow up. You can select more than one dispatch type as a follow up.

Close Dispatch Settings

• Resource must be Dispatched Before Dispatch can be Closed: This setting requires a resource to be dispatched to an event before it will allow the event to be closed. This helps ensure accountability and accurate historical information
• Action/Component codes must be added before Dispatch can be closed: This setting requires Action & Component code entries before dispatch can be closed.
• A Reason Code must be selected before the Dispatch can be closed: This setting requires Reason code selected before dispatch can be closed.
• A Why Code must be selected when an Action and a Component are supplied to close a Dispatch: This setting requires the user to supply a Why Code.

Production Dispatch Settings

• Exclude from Production Status Dashboard: This setting excludes the dispatch type from being included on the Production Status Dashboards
  
  • example: You may want to use this for dispatch types like Audit, FMEA Review, Part Order, Work Order, etc. that have no significant impact or status on production
• Available for Selection in Operator Portal: This setting allows the Dispatch Type to be selectable from the Operator Portal.
• Automatically launch Dispatch when a metric meets line threshold: Enabling this will provide a new section beneath to select lines and metrics that you want to launch a Dispatch. Launch Dispatch / Notification when Line meets set Metrics Threshold

We're now showing Related Items in the Dispatch Type Setup screen: Documents, Questions, Notifications, Areas, Work Order Categories, Actions, Components, Reasons, Why Codes, and Schedules. The arrow will take you to that section of Dispatch. This is an easy way to set up this information for the Dispatch Type as well as one place to view everywhere in the system a Dispatch Type touches. 

Probably the most important feature built into L2L to support the OPM process is the interactive digital checklists. In the past, implementing daily checks from Operators has been a manual task that included printing, filling out, and collecting mass quantities of paperwork.  With new technology found in L2L's digital checklists, the daily routine of inspecting the machine can now be done on a mobile device. Additionally, checklists can now be designed to react to conditions found during the inspection, then launch new follow-up dispatched to set in motion the proper reaction to abnormalities found.

Builkd OPM Checklist.mov

Note: In order to perform OPM via the Event Scheduler, Operators will need to have 'Resource' rights in their User profile to have the ability to interact and disposition the dispatch.