What are the TPM Pillars?
The pillars are the fundamental strategies to develop the program. These pillars support the construction of an orderly production system. They are implemented following a disciplined, powerful, and effective methodology. The JIPM considers eight pillars necessary for the development of TPM in an organization:
1. Focused Improvements or Kobetsu Kaizen
They are activities that are developed with the intervention of the different areas involved in the production process, with the objective Maximize the Overall Effectiveness of Equipment, Processes and Plants; all of this through organized work in functional and interfunctional teams that employ specific methodology and focus their attention on eliminating any of the 16 losses existing in industrial plants.
2. Autonomous Maintenance or Jishu Hozen
One of the activities of the TPM system is the involvement of production personnel in maintenance activities. This is one of the processes with the greatest impact on improving productivity. Its purpose is to involve operators in equipment care through a high level of professional training and preparation, respect for operating conditions, and keeping work areas free of contamination, dirt, and clutter.
Autonomous maintenance is based on the operator's knowledge of the equipment's condition, including its mechanisms, operational aspects, care and maintenance, handling, breakdowns, etc. With this knowledge, operators will be able to understand the importance of maintaining working conditions, the need to perform preventive inspections, participate in problem analysis, and perform light maintenance work initially, in order to later assimilate more complex maintenance actions.
3. Planned Maintenance
The objective of planned maintenance is to eliminate equipment problems through improvement, prevention, and prediction actions. Proper management of maintenance activities requires information bases, data-driven knowledge generation, resource scheduling capabilities, maintenance technology management, and the ability to motivate and coordinate the human team responsible for these activities.
4. Quality Maintenance or Hinshitsu Hozen
The purpose of this type of maintenance is to improve product quality by reducing variability by monitoring the condition of components and equipment that directly impact the product's quality characteristics. In the industrial environment, it is often understood that equipment causes problems when it fails and stops; however, breakdowns can occur that do not stop the equipment from operating but cause losses due to changes in the quality characteristics of the final product. Quality maintenance is a type of preventive maintenance focused on maintaining the condition of the resulting product.
5. Maintenance Prevention
These are improvement activities carried out during the design, construction, and commissioning phases of equipment, with the goal of reducing maintenance costs during operation. A company looking to acquire new equipment can use the performance history of its existing machinery to identify possible design improvements and drastically reduce the causes of breakdowns from the moment a new piece of equipment is purchased. Maintenance prevention techniques are based on reliability theory, which requires solid databases on breakdown and repair frequency.
6. Administrative areas
This type of activity does not involve the production team. Departments such as planning, development, and administration do not produce direct value as production, but they facilitate and offer the necessary support for the production process to operate efficiently, with the lowest costs, the most timely manner, and the highest quality. Their support is typically offered through a process that produces informationThere too, the potential losses to be recovered are enormous.
7. Education and Training
Skills relate to the correct way of interpreting and acting according to the conditions established for the proper functioning of processes. This is the knowledge acquired through reflection and experience accumulated in daily work over time. TPM requires personnel who have developed skills to perform the following activities:
- Ability to identify and detect problems in equipment.
- Understand how equipment works.
- Understand the relationship between equipment mechanisms and product quality characteristics.
- Ability to analyze and solve problems in the functioning and operations of processes.
- Ability to retain knowledge and teach other colleagues.
- Ability to work and cooperate with areas related to industrial processes.
8. Safety and Environment
The number of accidents increases in proportion to the number of minor downtimes. For this reason, the development of Autonomous Maintenance and the effective implementation of the 5S are the foundation of safety. Kobetsu Kaizen is the tool for eliminating risks in equipment. Training in perception skills is the basis for risk identification, since personnel deeply trained in the equipment assume greater responsibility for its health and safety.
The practice of TPM processes creates accountability for compliance with regulations and standards, which reduces losses and improves productivity.
Eng. Raúl A. Perez Verzini
International Instructor TPM # 723
Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance.
