The cost of downtime is staggering. Consider these statistics:
- Organisations lose up to 1% to 10% of their total production time due to scheduled and unscheduled downtime.
- Equipment downtime causes an average manufacturer to lose 800 hours annually or 15 hours per week.
- Industrial manufacturers lose up to $50 billion a year because of unscheduled downtime.
Downtime is costly, and disruptive and your business cannot afford it in a competitive world. One way to minimise it is to adopt a holistic approach to equipment maintenance that not only eliminates system breakdowns but also optimises product output and quality.
This is where Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), a subset of Lean Manufacturing, steps in. It's a methodology widely applied across manufacturing operations to shift equipment upkeep from a reactive cost centre into a shared, proactive discipline.
What does total productive maintenance (TPM) mean?
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a comprehensive programme for maintaining and improving manufacturing machinery through proactive and preventive maintenance techniques. TPM aims to eliminate equipment breakdowns, defects, or any accidents that can cause downtime and impact production. At its core, the TPM meaning is about making equipment reliability everyone's job, not just the maintenance team's, in manufacturing environments where a single unplanned stop can ripple across an entire production line.
TPM improves the quality of production and operations by making maintenance a shared responsibility of maintenance teams, plant floor workers, and senior executives. In other words, it gets operators and executives proactively involved in maintaining their equipment rather than relying on maintenance teams to fix it after a breakdown.
This approach requires continuous employee training and seamless collaboration between maintenance and production teams. TPM's methodology is credited to Seiichi Nakajima and was developed in Japan between 1950 and 1970; Nippondenso, a parts supplier within the Toyota Group, became one of the first companies recognised with the PM (Productive Maintenance) Prize for its implementation in 1971. The approach has since been refined and adopted across manufacturing industries worldwide. By implementing TPM, industries can eliminate:
- Equipment malfunction
- Product defects
- Resource waste
- Employee accidents
- Human errors
The primary goal of TPM is to ensure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). OEE is a measure of the equipment’s efficiency and is calculated as a product of asset availability, performance, and quality. When OEE is 100%, it means that the equipment is functioning at optimal capacity. In formula terms, OEE = Availability × Performance × Quality. A score of 100% means every part is produced as fast as possible, with no stops and no defects; an OEE of 85% or higher is widely cited across the industry as the "world class" benchmark manufacturers work toward.
TPM methodology – 5S and the 8 pillars of lean manufacturing
The TPM approach is based on ‘5S’, a foundation of five principles that form the basis of lean management. The 5S are as follows:
- Sort – Sort essential tools, resources, and materials by their purpose and frequency of use. Eliminate broken, obsolete, and unnecessary equipment.
- Set in order – Organise the useful resources and put them in their allotted places.
- Shine – Clean the workspace and equipment regularly to promote efficiency and safety.
- Standardise – Set standard procedures for the first three activities.
- Sustain – Ensure smooth operations through the 5S system and sustain them for the long term.
These five elements support the eight pillars of TPM that assist in proactive and preventive facility maintenance.
- Autonomous maintenance – Train operators to perform routine cleaning and maintenance on their assigned equipment.
- Focused improvement – Form small teams to undertake focused improvement tasks and resolve issues through a cross-functional approach.
- Planned maintenance – Schedule regular maintenance tasks based on the machine’s age, efficiency, and failure-rate data.
- Early equipment management – Use the practical knowledge and experience of operators and maintenance personnel while designing new machinery so that it can meet the planned performance levels.
- Quality maintenance – Use automated programs to monitor equipment performance. Undertake root cause analyses to identify and eliminate recurring issues. Design new equipment with built-in error detection and prevention tools.
- Training and education – Hold continuous training programmes for employees at all levels – operators, maintenance staff, senior executives, and management – to educate them about TPM goals and ensure organisation-wide participation.
- Safety, health, environment (SHE) – Always provide a safe working environment to eliminate accidents and enhance productivity.
- TPM in administration – Ensure that TPM goals extend beyond production and address waste in all administrative functions, such as scheduling, procurement, and order processing.
TPM implementation
There are five key steps to successfully implementing a TPM programme in your organisation, as follows:
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Identify a pilot area
Start with a small pilot area or a single piece of equipment as a tester. This will help you avoid overwhelm, gauge the benefits of TPM, and get buy-in. The pilot area could be any of these three:
- The easiest to improve
- The one with the maximum bottlenecks
- The one with the most frequent breakdowns
Whichever area you choose, set a specific, measurable target for it up front (for example, a target OEE percentage or a maximum number of unplanned stops per week) rather than a general "improve this line" goal, and assemble a small cross-functional pilot team of around four to six people, typically operators, a maintenance technician, and a supervisor, so the pilot reflects how the full rollout will actually work.
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Bring equipment to its prime operating condition
In this step, you restore the chosen machinery to its baseline state by applying the 5S principles:
- Declutter the work area
- Organise all your tools and resources
- Meticulously clean the machinery and workspace
- Establish SOPs and checklists to ensure that all employees follow the first three activities
- Document the changes and perform regular audits to maintain the continuity of this process
Once you establish the 5S, enlist the help of maintenance teams in training machine operators to perform autonomous maintenance. A simple before-and-after photo of the equipment and workspace, taken at the start of the pilot and again once the 5S steps are complete, gives the team a visible benchmark for what "clean and organised" means going forward, and is a quick way to demonstrate early wins when reporting progress to leadership.
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Track OEE
To track OEE, collect a few weeks’ OEE data, identify the drops in OEE percentage over time, and perform root cause analysis to establish the reasons. This will help you to identify problem areas and address issues before they escalate.
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Address losses
The purpose of tracking OEE is to eliminate the six major losses to an organisation, including –
- Unscheduled stops
- Setup and adjustments
- Small stops
- Slow functioning
- Production defects
- Reduced output
Your ‘focused improvement’ team can identify these losses and find solutions.
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Introduce proactive maintenance
Identify the wear-prone, failure-prone, and stress-prone components of your equipment and train operators to run predictive and preventive maintenance on schedule.
Implementing TPM processes in your organisation can dramatically improve your productivity, work environment, and bottom line.
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How can Infosys BPM help with total productive maintenance?
Infosys BPM provides extensive manufacturing support services for organisations planning to implement TPM at the workplace. Sustaining TPM in manufacturing environments over the long term takes more than the initial pilot – it takes consistent documentation, tracking, and reporting discipline across shifts and sites, which is where outsourced support adds the most value. Our manufacturing and operations support offerings include tools and resources for equipment performance management, quality management, production planning, documentation support, and much more.
Know more about manufacturing bpo services and how Infosys BPM services can help your organisation eliminate losses and boost productivity.
Frequently asked questions
Preventive maintenance is a scheduled maintenance tactic – servicing equipment at set intervals to reduce breakdowns. It's actually one part of TPM, covered under the "planned maintenance" pillar above. TPM is the broader philosophy: it combines preventive maintenance with operator-led autonomous maintenance, root-cause analysis, and OEE tracking, and makes equipment upkeep a shared responsibility across the whole organisation rather than the maintenance team's job alone. Predictive maintenance is a related but separate approach that uses real-time sensor data to anticipate failures before they happen – TPM can incorporate predictive techniques too, but isn't limited to them.
A typical TPM rollout starts exactly as described above: a manufacturer picks one bottleneck machine as a pilot, trains its operators to handle routine cleaning and inspection (autonomous maintenance), and has the maintenance team move from reacting to breakdowns to following a set schedule (planned maintenance). The team tracks that machine's OEE weekly, so a drop in performance is caught and investigated before it turns into unplanned downtime, rather than after.
Based on the goals TPM is built around: fewer unplanned equipment breakdowns, fewer product defects and fewer workplace accidents, less resource waste, higher Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), and a maintenance culture where operators, maintenance teams, and management share responsibility for equipment performance instead of treating it as the maintenance department's problem alone.
TPM stands for Total Productive Maintenance. The TPM meaning goes beyond the full form itself: it's a maintenance philosophy that makes equipment reliability a shared responsibility across operators, maintenance teams, and management, built around the 5S principles and the eight pillars covered above, rather than a single department's task.
OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is calculated as Availability × Performance × Quality. Availability accounts for unplanned stops, Performance accounts for slow cycles and small stops, and Quality accounts for defective output. A score of 100% means the equipment ran at maximum speed, for 100% of the planned time, with zero defects; a score of 85% or higher is widely cited across the industry as the "world class" benchmark.
TPM's methodology is credited to Seiichi Nakajima, developed in Japan between 1950 and 1970. Nippondenso, a parts supplier within the Toyota Group, became one of the first companies recognised with the PM (Productive Maintenance) Prize for applying it, in 1971, and the approach has since been adopted by manufacturers worldwide.
