Glossary

TPM (total productive maintenance)

In short

Total productive maintenance, or TPM, is a maintenance approach that involves equipment operators in the routine care of their own machines, alongside the maintenance team, to maximise uptime. It aims to reduce breakdowns, defects and accidents by building everyday cleaning, inspection and minor maintenance into the operator's role, and it is closely tied to the OEE measure of equipment effectiveness.

TPM (total productive maintenance)

Total productive maintenance, or TPM, is a maintenance approach that brings equipment operators into the routine care of their own machines, working alongside the maintenance team rather than leaving everything to it. The aim is to maximise the productive availability of equipment by cutting the losses that come from breakdowns, slow running, defects and stoppages. In a TPM culture, the person who runs a machine is the first line of its upkeep.

How TPM works

TPM is usually described in terms of a set of pillars built on a foundation of workplace organisation. The pillar most people meet first is autonomous maintenance: operators take on everyday cleaning, inspection, lubrication and minor adjustment of the equipment they use. Because they are with the machine all day, they notice the early signs, a new noise, a small leak, a loose guard, that a periodic visit might miss.

The other pillars cover planned maintenance led by the maintenance team, focused improvement to attack specific losses, quality maintenance to stop defects at the equipment, early-equipment management to design problems out, training so people have the skills, safety and environment, and carrying the approach into the office and support functions. The detail matters less than the idea: reliability is a shared responsibility, and small, frequent attention prevents large, costly failures.

What it tells you

A team running TPM well tends to see fewer unplanned breakdowns, more stable output and a maintenance team spending more time on skilled, planned work and less on firefighting. The discipline of daily operator checks also produces a steady stream of small jobs that get caught early, which is cheaper than waiting for a failure.

TPM is measured through OEE, overall equipment effectiveness, which combines availability, performance and quality into a single figure. TPM exists to lift OEE by reducing the losses behind each component, so the two ideas travel together. For the reliability side of the picture, TPM also relates to measures like MTBF, since fewer breakdowns means a longer mean time between failures.

How it relates to Cohiva Control

Cohiva Control supports a TPM way of working in two practical ways. Its preventive maintenance scheduling lets you set the planned, time-based and meter-based jobs that the planned-maintenance pillar relies on, generating work orders automatically without duplicates. Its inspections give operators a structured way to run the everyday checks of autonomous maintenance: an inspection template captures pass or fail, numeric, photo and signature items, and a failed item can raise a work order automatically, so an operator’s observation becomes a tracked repair rather than a note that gets lost. Every asset event is written to an append-only audit trail, which is the record a team uses to see whether its TPM effort is actually reducing breakdowns. See preventive maintenance and OEE for the related ideas.

Part of the Cohiva platform

Cohiva Control is part of the Cohiva platform. Leisure operators often run it with Cohiva Complex, and finance teams connect it to Cohiva Crunch for the general ledger. Explore the platform at www.cohiva.app.

Frequently asked questions

What is the goal of TPM?
To maximise the productive availability of equipment by reducing the losses that come from breakdowns, slow running, defects and stoppages. TPM treats reliability as everyone's job, not only the maintenance team's, and aims at fewer unplanned failures over time.
What is autonomous maintenance?
It is the TPM idea that operators take on routine cleaning, inspection, lubrication and minor adjustment of the equipment they run, freeing the maintenance team for more skilled work and catching small problems early before they become breakdowns.
How does TPM relate to OEE?
OEE, overall equipment effectiveness, is the measure TPM uses to track progress. TPM works to lift availability, performance and quality, the three components of OEE, by attacking the losses behind each.
Is TPM only for manufacturing?
It started in manufacturing, but the principle of involving operators in the care of their equipment applies anywhere with plant to keep running, from a leisure centre's pool plant to a kitchen or a building's HVAC.