Total Productive Maintenance makes equipment reliability a shared responsibility between the people operating machines and the people maintaining them, rather than a technical function that arrives after a breakdown.
The conventional split has operators produce and technicians repair, with nothing happening between failures. TPM moves routine care — cleaning, inspection, lubrication, minor adjustment — to the operator, on the reasoning that the person at the machine every day notices change first. A technician sees the equipment when it is already broken.
Cleaning does most of the work, and not for the reason it appears to. Cleaning is inspection: leaks, wear, loose fittings and heat are found by hand and eye long before they become stoppages.
It is measured with OEE, which places its losses in three groups — breakdowns, minor stoppages and slow running, and defects. Minor stoppages are usually the largest and the least visible, being individually trivial and collectively enormous.
It fails where operators are given the tasks without the time, which turns it into unpaid extra work and it stops within months.
