1.4 Delegation of employees at TPM
The key point about TPM is that its pillars and actions are not the responsibility and implementation of management alone or individual employees. TPM can only work successfully if it is understood and lived by every single person in a company – in other words: if it becomes part of the corporate culture.
An important task of management is therefore to communicate TPM to employees and to delegate the tasks and approaches that go along with it. After all, it is no longer management that is responsible for the processes and procedures, but each employee.
For this to work successfully, three important prerequisites must be observed:
- Management must be prepared to implement an improvement process continuously and in the long term, involving all employees.
- A correspondingly high budget must be provided for the training and education of staff.
- All stakeholders need to be patient in accepting and continuing the constant corporate culture change that TPM brings.
TPM must become part of the company culture. Use what you have learned about the basics of TPM, live it and pass this knowledge on to your staff. Let employees discuss working groups and always have an open ear for ideas and suggestions for improvement. In this way, you actively exert a positive influence on the corporate culture.
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To implement activities within the framework of TPM together with the staff, a step-by-step and systematic approach in four phases, which can be constantly repeated, helps per action:
- Preparation: A possible improvement has been identified, for example during an inspection. The manager now prepares possible key figures, actions as well as the knowledge necessary for the staff.
- Kick-off: All people involved are informed about planned actions in a joint meeting and at the same time included in the process. The aim is a joint evaluation.
- Roll-out: The actions are implemented by all stakeholders.
- Consolidation: Key figures after implementation are collected in practice, evaluated and flow into the process database.
A good method to delegate actions according to TPM is the appointment of internal working groups, which jointly work out weak points in the course of process analysis (e.g., according to the 16 failure modes) and discuss solutions models. Employees from all relevant production areas as well as from areas not directly involved in the production should be included.
In the automotive industry, it is particularly important to teach one pillar of TPM – autonomous maintenance. According to this, all employees who work directly on a plant also take responsibility for the maintenance of the equipment or the prevention of plant failures.
In the first step, this concerns, for example, regular cleaning or the changing of operating materials such as lubricating oil, but it can also go so far that major maintenance work or repairs are carried out independently and, above all, immediately. On the one hand, this requires sufficient training on the equipment, but on the other hand, it also requires a comprehensive understanding of factors such as cleanliness at the workplace, correct checking of the equipment for proper functioning and complete access to all necessary areas.
In the production plan, there is a line consisting of several machines. The production line is difficult to set up. The line is serviced by about eighteen operators working in three shifts. It took one worker about 45 minutes to set up one production line. Today, setup takes about 15 minutes. A machine setup plan and a TPM sheet for the given machine are prepared for each machine. For example, a plan for setting up a sensor using a setting jig. The preparation control is carried out by manufacturing the first part, measuring on the spot, and removing impurities, by suction, or rinsing. The TPM sheet is set for a certain time. After one hour of operation, the operator is alerted in the TPM sheet about what needs to be checked, set, or adjusted. Similarly, TPM sheets available for the shift, alert the operator of steps to be performed during the shift. TPM sheets for a day alert the operator of steps to be performed once a day, and so on, once a week – for example, once a week it is necessary to perform a longer preventive or more complex check on the equipment according to the manual, with individual steps highlighted in pictures or photographs, the exact location of the intervention is marked, and so on. This takes into account the difficulty of maintaining machines in operation and the need to minimize downtime in the production process.
