TPM Implementation: A Japanese Approach

Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a new approach to plant maintenance that combines preventive maintenance with total quality control and employee involvement. This book offers engineers a step-by-step programme for implementing TPM in the equipment-oriented assembly industry. The authors explain basic TPM concepts and outline seven steps for achieving autonomous maintenance. These include initial cleaning - describing why cleaning is necessary and how to do it; countermeasures to source of contamination - explaining how to improve equipment to maintain cleanliness; cleaning and lubricating standards - showing how to lubricate equipment; overall inspection - describes how to inspect and fix equipment defects; autonomous maintenance - explaining how to achieve zero defects; and self control - discussing how to maintain zero breakdowns and zero defects once they have been achieved and offers a proposal for future TPM. The book also describes how to apply the TPM concept to repetitive work such as the automobile assembly process and presents case studies from Toyota, Sony and other Japanese firms.