What Total Productive Maintenance Is

Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a way of running a plant in which everyone who works with equipment shares responsibility for keeping it in good condition. Operators, maintenance staff, engineers, managers and office staff all take part. The goal is not only to repair equipment faster. The goal is to stop the losses that equipment causes: breakdowns, slow running, small stops, defects and accidents.

The three words explain the idea:

• Total means everyone, every department and the whole life of the equipment, from design to scrapping.
• Productive means the aim is effective production, not maintenance for its own sake.
• Maintenance means keeping equipment in the condition it was designed to work in, and improving it where that condition is not good enough.

Who this course is for

This course is written for maintenance and production supervisors and engineers, and for reliability staff. It assumes you already know what preventive maintenance is and that you have worked near production equipment. It goes beyond the definitions: you will calculate overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) from shift data, judge whether a figure can be trusted, and plan how operators and maintenance staff work together.

What this course does not give you

This is awareness and practitioner training. It does not award a certificate, a qualification or a licence from any TPM body, and it does not lead to one. Several organisations run their own TPM assessments and awards. If your employer needs one of those, ask the awarding body directly.

A short example

A press cell at Brenlow Engineering stops several times each shift because a sensor gets covered in oil mist. Each time, the operator calls a technician, who wipes the sensor and restarts the press. Nobody records these stops because each one lasts only a few minutes. Under TPM, the operator cleans the sensor at the start of each shift as part of a written standard, the team records every stop, and an improvement team fits a shield that keeps the mist away. The stops almost disappear. No single step was difficult. What changed was that everyone looked at the loss together.