Implementation of Total Productive Maintenance in an Automotive Assembly Plant

Implementation of Total Productive Maintenance in an Automotive Assembly Plant

Equipment performance plays an important role in every industrial organization. Maintenance is concerned with the performance of a wide variety of activities neededfor ensuring the smooth working of equipment and facilities. With increasing importancetowards reducing wastes and maximizing productivity for manufacturing companies, optimizingthe processes and machinery performance has become more critical than everbefore. This needs a higher attention to be given to the reliability of the production facilities, to achieve good product quality at less cost. The maintenance and managementof the company's production facilities is of increasing importance in modern factories. The measurement of their utilization will bring useful information about company performance. Total productive maintenance (TPM) is an equipment improvement effort, bringing maintenance and production departments together to prevent equipment downtimeand failures. The fast rate of acceptance of TPM indicates that the practitionersalways have the thirst for improvement in equipment performance. The overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) measure is the basic requirement in a manufacturingindustry improvement approach of TPM effort. Manufacturing organizationcan use the OEE calculations to know, how effectively the equipment is running. An accurateOEE percentage indicates whether the equipment is running at optimum capacityand producing quality output or experiencing unnecessary downtime. This study investigatesand makes use of OEE performance measurement. The OEE measure basicallyconsists of three factors namely availability, performance efficiency and quality The TPMactivities will eliminate equipment losses related to availability, performance rate, andquality rate. Hence, the TPM implementation will increase the OEE value. This project outlines the theories of TPM and OEE and implementation of the samein an automotive assembly plant. The automotive assembly plant entering in the massproduction phase is struggling to achieve a decent OEE percentge. An attempt have beenmade to increase the OEE by using different lean tools and thus implementing TPM inan automotive assembly plant.