IMPLEMENTATION $ RESULTS OF TOTAL PRODUCTIVE MAINTENANCE IN A SME

To Apply the TPM concept in a medium enterprise working in publishing industry, was a great challenge and an opportunity to verify the universality of procedures and the power of TPM to improve OEE indexes of the firm. The results of experiment can be used for re-organize the firm departments, and specially for improving the methods of monitoring, surveillance and control the machines and workers. The experimental results after one year of TPM practicing has undoubtedly shown that TPM is one of the most effective ways to reduce cycle time, to improve operational efficiency and to create a lean organization. 1. WHAT IS TPM A lot of scientifically papers, presented in different conferences all over the world, have already emphasized the importance of maintenance in manufacturing systems especially. For this reason, a large pallet of maintenance concepts, theoretically and practically training courses, guidelines and their application in connection with the basic rules etc. were conceived, tested and implemented. More recent publications [1], [2] emphasize the importance of an early consideration of maintainability and a systematic approach, and such because maintenance is related to safety, ergonomics and assembly. A lot of books and scientifically articles addressing these topics already include suggestions and rules relevant to maintenance, generally speaking and to TMP in particular; this paper focuses on what is necessary for a general understanding and implementing of TPM concept and what are the benefits for a SME in a specific case. Historically, TPM is an innovative Japanese concept derivative from Preventive maintenance in which the routine maintenance of equipment would be carried out by the operators, while maintenance department took up only essential maintenance works. Thus preventive maintenance along with maintenance prevention and maintainability improvement gave birth to productive maintenance. The aim of productive maintenance was to maximize plant and equipment effectiveness to achieve optimum life cycle cost of production equipment. Applying general rules of productive maintenance to all departments of the firm, offices included, the new concept has become Total Productive Maintenance. Nowadays, TPM is a manufacturing-led initiative that creates a collaborative approach among all stakeholders within an organization—particularly between operations and maintenance—in an effort to achieve production efficiency, uninterrupted operations and ensure a quick, proactive maintenance response to prevent equipment-specific problems The TPM program uses in common with TQM some of the tools such as employee empowerment, benchmarking, documentation, etc. and also has some similar characteristics with it: total commitment to the program by upper level management, employees must be empowered to initiate corrective action, changes in employee mind-set toward their job responsibilities must take place as well, and a long range outlook must be accepted as TPM may take a year or more to implement and is an on-going process. The main differences between TPM and other concepts are the following: the activities and measures are focused on inputs and causes for equipments, the required employees participation is hardware oriented and, the result of implementation must be elimination of losses and wastes in SME. ANNALS of the ORADEA UNIVERSITY. Fascicle of Management and Technological Engineering, Volume IX (XIX), 2010, NR2