Implementing total productive maintenance : driving forces and obstacles

Abstract: The global marketplace is highly competitive and organisations who want to survive long-term, have to continuously improve, change and adapt in response to market demands. Improvements in a company's performance should focus on cost cutting, increasing productivity levels, quality and guaranteeing deliveries in order to satisfy customers. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is one method, which can be used to achieve these goals. TPM is an approach to equipment management that involves employees from both production and maintenance departments. Its purpose is to eliminate major production losses by introducing a program of continuous and systematic improvements to production equipment. TPM should be developed and expanded to embrace the whole organisation and all employees should be involved in the process as members of improvement teams. This thesis describes the development of TPM and the TPM implementation process. Research is focused on the implementation process of TPM. The author has had the opportunity of both monitoring and steering a company through part of its TPM implementation program and has conducted a longitudinal study. The implementation process takes several years and this thesis focuses on the initial three years of the process. This study demonstrates that driving forces, obstacles and difficulties often are dependent on the organisation, its managers and the individual employees. It also shows that the TPM implementation process has many similarities to the implementation of other improvement concepts. The analysis of these findings forms the basis for recommendations and guidance for organisations, who intend to implement TPM.