Lean manufacturing tool - TPM (Total Productive Maintenance)Lean manufacturing depends on continuous flow of value. Any interruption to this flow is treated as waste. Certainly one common way that stops this flow in the manufacturing process is the machine breakdown. Even full maintenance sometime can cost days of time. Since there is no work in progress to depend on one machine breakdown will mean more than one machine stoppage. This might mean full manufacturing line stoppage. So anyone can understand the importance of avoiding the machine breakdowns. Lean manufacturing achieve this objective of maintenance with TPM or total productive maintenance. Total productive maintenance consists of three main areas. They are corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance and maintenance prevention. There is a possibility of machine breakdown at any system. Corrective maintenance answers this by quickly fixing the problem and bringing to the order. This is the lowest level of the TPM system. In the next step of TPM there is preventive maintenance. This is to make sure there are no machine breakdowns. Actually most of these breakdowns are due to avoidable reasons. Preventive maintenance will get read of these causes. Continuous routine machine checks and regular cleaning will drive this process. The third step is maintenance prevention. This is one of the very important concepts in lean manufacturing. This step is more towards strategic decision making. This discus the possibility of preventing the requirement for maintenance by choosing correct machinery, correct processes etc. choosing machinery which are robust and easy to operate can bring down the requirement for maintenance from a great deal. |
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