An Evaluation of TPM Implementation in Clothing Industry in India -- A Lean Philosophy Based Approach

The current industrial engineering system gives more importance to production process in clothing Industry. This typical system creates high amount of non-value added activity particularly high rework and rejection, poor line balancing, poor machine maintenance etc. Large amount research findings concluded that the high production philosophy is connected with superior machine maintenance. The machine related problems are addressed through Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) system, which is an important tools under the umbrella of Lean production philosophy. In this research work the researcher team used TPM as a key lean tools to address the said issues at ABC Clothing factory, India. T-shirt production layout was selected for this study, where in 5 different sewing machines were chosen for TPM implementation. Performance efficiency levels of these sewing machines were studied before and after the TPM implantation. It found that 15% to 30% of improvement in performance improvement and also found the lead time improvement due to TPM implementation on sewing machines as well as interaction effect with kaizen tool is also exist with respect to product lead time improvement. Emotional balance of the employees (Samuel Thavaraj 2014) may also have an influence on effective implementation of the TPM.