Implementation Of Tpm In An Automotive Assembly Plant

Abstract

Equipment performance plays an important role in every industrial organization. Maintenance is concerned with the performance of a wide variety of activities needed for ensuring the smooth working of equipment and facilities. With increasing importance towards reducing wastes and maximizing productivity for manufacturing companies, optimizing the processes and machinery performance has become more critical than ever before. This needs a higher attention to be given to the reliability of the production facilities, to achieve good product quality at less cost. The maintenance and management of the company’s production facilities is of increasing importance in modern factories. The measurement of their utilization will bring useful information about company performance. Total productive maintenance (TPM) is an equipment improvement effort, bringing maintenance and production departments together to prevent equipment downtime and failures. The fast rate of acceptance of TPM indicates that the practitioners always have the thirst for improvement in equipment performance. The overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) measure is the basic requirement in a manufacturing industry improvement approach of TPM effort. Manufacturing organization can use the OEE calculations to know, how effectively the equipment is running. An accurate OEE percentage indicates whether the equipment is running at optimum capacity and producing quality output or experiencing unnecessary downtime. This study investigates and makes use of OEE performance measurement. The OEE measure basically consists of three factors namely availability, performance efficiency and quality The TPM activities will eliminate equipment losses related to availability, performance rate, and quality rate. Hence, the TPM implementation will increase the OEE value. This project outlines the theories of TPM and OEE and implementation of the same in an automotive assembly plant. The automotive assembly plant entering in the mass production phase is struggling to achieve a decent OEE percentge. An attempt have been made to increase the OEE by using different lean tools and thus implementing TPM in an automotive assembly plant.