Total Productive Maintenance - Accelerating OEE in a Manufacturing Industry Leveraging Pervasive Technologies

Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a people-intensive, preventive maintenance system for maximizing equipment effectiveness in the enterprise. The concept of TPM was originally suggested by Nakajima (1988) who proposed overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) as a metric for evaluating the progress of TPM, which is interpreted as the multiplication of availability, performance and quality. This paper aims to study and investigate the implementation of a TPM to improve the OEE in manufacturing enterprises. In today’s industrial scenario huge losses occur in the manufacturing shop floor. These losses are due to operators, maintenance personal, process, tooling problems and non-availability of components in time etc. The quality related waste are of significant importance as they matter the company in terms of time, material and the hard earned reputation of the company. There are also other invisible losses like operating the machines below the rated speed, start up loss, break down of the machines and bottle necks in process. Zero oriented concepts such as zero tolerance for losses, defects, break down and zero accidents are becoming a pre-requisite in the manufacturing and assembly industry. In this situation, a TPM is the answer to resolve the above said problems which helps in benefitting the growth prospects of any organization.