Total productive maintenance: a shared practice, not a campaign.
TPM works when operators and maintenance teams share signals, standards, and decisions. The goal is not delegating maintenance, but preventing losses before they become normal.
Make losses visible
Relate microstops, defects, and reviews to the equipment that creates them.
Define verifiable basic care
Turn operator inspections into useful evidence, not context-free checkboxes.
Scale improvements that work
Measure whether each standard reduces loss before extending it across the plant.
What TPM is
Total Productive Maintenance was born at Nippondenso in 1971 and formalized by Seiichi Nakajima and the JIPM. Its goal is zero breakdowns, zero defects and zero accidents, involving the whole plant, not only the maintenance team, in equipment care.
The 8 pillars of TPM
Autonomous maintenance, planned maintenance, focused improvement (kobetsu kaizen), quality maintenance, early equipment management, training, office TPM, and safety, health and environment.
The 6 big losses and OEE
Breakdowns, setups and adjustments, minor stops, reduced speed, process defects and startup losses. OEE is the TPM metric: availability, performance and quality summarize those six losses in one number.
Autonomous maintenance in 7 steps
Initial cleaning, eliminating contamination sources, cleaning and lubrication standards, general inspection, autonomous inspection, standardization and autonomous management. Each step leaves a verifiable practice before moving on.
TPM does not replace maintenance
Operator participation does not mean shifting complex repairs. It means detecting, caring for and communicating conditions before they escalate, while maintenance focuses on planned and predictive work.
Improvement needs a shared source
If production records a stop on paper and maintenance checks another system, the cause is lost. A shared context lets both roles review the same event.
Start with one recurring loss
Pick a frequent minor stop or defect, define a standard condition and measure OEE before and after. TPM matures when each cycle leaves a verifiable practice.
TPM with plant data
Sensors count minor stops and cycles without anyone writing them down; AI links the loss to the equipment and proposes where to look. The decision and the intervention remain with the operator and the technician.
TPM on the phone
Operators look after their machine and sign it off.
The start-of-shift autonomous inspection is done in the app, point by point. Anything odd the operator spots goes out as a tag for maintenance and lands in the asset record.
01
Autonomous maintenance, signed by the operator
Matías walks line 2 at the start of shift A: cleaning, lubrication, tightening and inspection, point by point. The noise on the M-204 goes out as a tag for Luis and the inspection is signed, with its PDF.
02
The asset record brings sensors, orders and spares together
The M-204 shows what its sensors read, every work order with who did it and how long it took, and that one 6205 bearing is left against a minimum of three. The procedure and the manual are one tap away.
Related
Connect TPM, OEE, and predictive maintenance
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