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Total
Productive Maintenance? Total Process Management? Total Productive
Manufacturing?
Total
Productive Mining?
Author:
Ross Kennedy - President, The Centre for TPM
(Australasia)
Introduction
Like
the Quality movement, TPM had its genesis in the Japanese car industry
in the 1970s. It evolved at Nippon Denso, a major supplier of the
Toyota Car Company, as a necessary element of the newly developed
Toyota Production System which was originally thought to only
incorporate Total Quality Control (TQC), Just in Time (JIT), and Total
Employee Involvement (TEI). It was not until 1988, with the
publication in English of the first of two authoritative texts on the
subject by Seiichi Nakajima, that the western world recognized and
started to understand the importance of TPM. It soon became obvious
that TPM was a critical missing link in successfully achieving not
only world class equipment performance to support TQC (variation
reduction) and JIT (lead time reduction), but was a powerful new means
to improving overall company performance.
Since
the early 90s, TPM has rapidly spread throughout the western world,
significantly improving the capacity, productivity, quality, delivery,
safety, morale and bottom line results of manufacturing, processing,
utilities, and mining companies. TPM is also having a major impact on revitalizing
and enhancing previous quality management or continuous
improvement initiatives.
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