Development of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) in Indian Industries

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is the productive maintenance carried out by all the employees In an organisation. TPM embraces three things: Improvement in OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), autonomous maintenance, and formation of small groups to carry out maintenance activity. In the production of goals, manufacturing systems are often operating at less capacity, productivity is low, and the costs of factory operations are high. This is happening at a time when international competition is increasing worldwide. The current market scenario shows that economy is in recession, competition is growing, installed capacity is greater than demand and selling and raw material prices are dictated by market. Hence profit depends on how efficient we are at conversion; therefore costs have to be brought down to improve competitiveness. TPM is an effective tool for reducing costs. Overall the TPM implementation leads to increase in overall equipment effectiveness or availability of machines, increase in productivity, improvement in quality reduction in inventories, reduction in numbers of accidents, reduced burden on maintenance department and implementation of scheduled preventive maintenance. In India, the implementation of TPM is restricted due to certain conditions, like lack of necessary knowledge/skill required at various levels, lack of automation in Indian industries, lack of motivation in operators, managers and management, shortage of quality manpower, resistance to change, fear of loosing information and trade secrets, amount of time and initial investment involved, and long period of implementation. There are number of industries that have either implemented or are at some implementation stage of TPM. The returns start to come as soon as the implementation starts and the results are astonishing. Indian industries should work hard in order to implement TPM. This paper gives the various benefits of TPM with results from various Indian industries. In spite of benefits Indian industries should try to get the awards for the implementation of TPM.