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Total Productive Maintenance or so called TPM has been implemented around the world for many years, especially in Japan, Asia and US. In order to compete among each other, a company is very much interested to implement Total Productive Maintenance to ensure their daily production at maximum output. However, not every plant was successful in implement it. Most of them were not even half way to fully implement it. So why is it?

In order to succeed an involvement and a commitment from top management is very very important. (Well of course this is not only for TPM but also to the other’s activity). From observation, there are few reasons that make the top management miss commitment to Total Productive Maintenance.

1. Management thinks that Total Productive Maintenance is a very basic activity and therefore, let it run by bottom level independently and causing lack of encouragement.
2. Management sees that Production System is more interested since it is easy to see the result compare to Total Productive Maintenance, which is seemed to focus on the machine and not the product. This has created a miss lead, although Total Productive Maintenance is the foundation of plant operation, and therefore, the image of not so much contributed to productivity has been inside their sub-conscious mind.
3. Management sees that machine is still under the responsibility of Maintenance people, although they had been taught that machine is everybody responsibility in order to minimize too many maintenance people been hired. Since they are still thinking only maintenance people been able to take care machine.
4. Management likes to think maintenance people not having enough jobs compare to production people (but of course you cannot see maintenance people at the production line all the time, since they need to prepare maintenance jobs at the workshop).
5. Most dangerous, some management think that maintaining a machine is all about spending a money and therefore they hate about it.
6. For all above reasons, some of the managements do not have enough information and benchmark to the important for Total Productive Maintenance.

All the above points must be eliminated from management mind if they want to see their productivity at maximum output when implementing Total Productive Maintenance. So commitment from management is very important to ensure implementation of Total Productive Maintenance run smoothly and give best result. Mr. Nakajima, the guru of Total Productive Maintenance said that is important that management or anybody called boss, must move actively in implementing Total Productive Maintenance.

How management shall encourage this activity to all employees?

1. They must prepare themselves to understand the important of TPM. Attend any training course and seminar about TPM to understand the activity and the result of TPM.
2.  When implementing TPM, most important that to make Production people to understand, since there is still a mind of “I use, you fix” i.e. production only use machine and maintenance person should take care the machine. It is a must to avoid this mind and ideology. Instead must have a mind of “I use, I take care”.
3. Encourage the TPM by providing enough tool and training to operator. Management should make some investment to this activity. Some factories even creative by making a competition among operators and giving rewards to operators toward encouragement of the activity.
4. There many things that can be done to encourage the TPM. It is important to ensure operator who runs TPM it at high morale.

In some factories who consider Total Productive Maintenance is very important to their daily productivity have setup a TPM committee to observe and monitor TPM activity. The function of this committee is to monitor, audit and analyze the activity and made improvement and kaizen to ensure Total Productive Maintenance run continuously. This is group of committee is a very good to have for a factory who has run for quite so long with the concept “I use, you fix”.