Total Productive Maintenance - History

History

TPM is an evolving process, starting from a Japanese idea that can be traced back to 1952, when preventive maintenance was introduced into Japan from the USA (Deming). Nippondenso, part of Toyota, was the first company in Japan to introduce plant wide preventive maintenance in 1960. In preventive maintenance, operators produced goods using machines and the maintenance group was dedicated to the work of maintaining those machines. However, with the high level of automation of Nippondenso, maintenance became a problem as so many more maintenance personnel were now required. So the management decided that much of the routine maintenance of equipment would now be carried out by the operators themselves. Autonomous Maintenance, one of the features of TPM, is more cost-effective as the operator (compared to a highly skilled engineer) is on a lower pay rate. This is not to reduce costs however; the operator has a better understanding of the how the equipment works daily, can tell if an issue is appearing, can tell if quality is decreasing, and, through constant learning, is allowed to follow a career path to a better job. The maintenance group then focused only on more complex problems and project work for long term upgrades.

The maintenance group performed equipment modification that would improve its reliability. These modifications were then made or incorporated into new equipment. The work of the maintenance group, with the support and input from operators and production engineers, is then to make changes that lead to maintenance prevention and increased quality through fewer defects and a reduction in scrap levels. Thus preventive maintenance along with maintenance prevention and maintainability improvement were grouped as productive maintenance. The aim of productive maintenance was to maximize plant and equipment effectiveness to achieve the optimum life cycle cost of production equipment.

Nippondenso already had quality circles which involved the employees in changes. Therefore, now, all employees took part in implementing Productive maintenance. Based on these developments Nippondenso was awarded the distinguished plant prize for developing and implementing TPM, by the Japanese Institute of Plant Engineers (JIPE). Thus Nippondenso of the Toyota group became the first company to obtain the TPM certifications.