ABSTRACT

Companies around the world spend a lot of money on buying new equipment to increase production but a little is done to get hundred percent output from the machine for which it is designed for.  Small losses in time or small deviation from designed capability are token as normal machine behaviour.  But now because of increased competency levels and demand of quality product at lowest cost, buying latest equipment is not a solution unless it is fully utilized.  The requirement for optimal preventive maintenance using, for instance, just-in-time  (JIT) and total quality maintenance (TQM) techniques has given rise to what has been called the total productive maintenance (TPM) approach.  Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a plan which concentrate on total involvement of everyone from top management to all employees to implement a comprehensive maintenance program for all equipment throughout its life.  This plan results to maximum effectiveness of equipment, tidier must and chosen work place and morally boosted employees.  This study explores the ways in which Nigeria manufacturing companies can implement TPM as strategy and culture for improving its performance and suggest self auditing and bench-marking as desirable prerequisite before TPM implementation

ABBREVIATIONS (commonly employed and used in this text)

JIT           -       Just-in-time

LCC          -       Life-cycle cost

OEE         -       Overall equipment effectiveness

PM           -       Preventive maintenance

TQM         -       Total quality Management

ZQC         -       Zero quality control

AM           -       Autonomous maintenance

MTRF       -       Mean time between Failure

MTTR       -       Mean time to Repair

MP           -       Manufacturing Performance.

CHAPTER ONE

1.0       INTRODUCTION

There is no manufacturing industry which render satisfactory services without its equipment undergoing the negative effect of deterioration.  This is due to the varying degree of forces to which the equipment are subjected to during operation.  These forces result in the gradual wearing away of the components and bring about reduction in performance of the system that is, product quality, price, delivery, dependability, flexibility, service and the capability of rapidly introducing new product.  To prevent these deteriorating tendencies, effort must be directed at containing the gradual wear and tear to which these systems are subjected.

The effort directed towards achieving this is called maintenance practice.  The rapid industrialization in the country and accompanying mechanization of most of the operations make maintenance practice inevitable and complex in nature.

Maintenance is undertaken to preserve the proper functioning of a physical system, so that it will continue to do what it was designed to do.  Its function and performance characteristics not only take account of output, unit cost and effectiveness of using energy, but also such factors as end-product quality, process control, achieved comfort and protection of the employed personnel, compliance with environmental protection regulations, structural integrity and even the physical appearance of the productive system.

The quality of maintenance significantly affects business profitability.  The factors involved include safety and customer service, not just plant cost and availability.  Increase down time affects adversely the capability of physical systems by reducing their average rate (i.e. speed) of output, so increasing the operating cost and lowering the average customer’s satisfaction with the service according to  Monbray J. (2000).  With system availability becoming critical, issues such as reducing operating costs as well as the strategic importance of employing better and, if feasible, optimal maintenance schedules need to be more universally recognized and implemented.

Today’s world is one of growing expectations, increasingly onerous regulatory constraints, shifting technological paradigms and apparently endless and urgent reorganizations.  Just as each major corporation has evolved a mission statement to help maintain a unified approach despite varying distractions, it is also desirable to developed a mission philosophy and statement to help maintenance staff do likewise.

Maintenance serves three distinct sets – the owners, the users of the system, and society as a whole.  Owners are usually satisfied if their system generates an adequate and continuing financial return on their capital investment.  Users want each asset to continue to do whatever it was designed to do, to a standard of performance, which they consider at least to be satisfactory.  Society expect the assets, in which investments have been made, not to fail in ways that lead to threat to public health and safety as well as environment.

The technology of maintenance is about finding and apply cost-effective ways of avoiding or overcoming performance deterioration.  Failure management techniques include predictive and preventive actions, failure.  Finding, and changes to the design of the physical asset or the way it is operated.  Each category includes a host of options, some of which are far more effective than others.  Maintenance staffs not only need to be aware of what these options are, but they also have to decide which is appropriate to their circumstances.  Making a wise choice should improve the asset’s performance, as well as reduce overall costs.  However, making a wrong choice could creat new problems while existing ones may worsen.  Therefore, the relevant mission statement should emphasize the need to make the most-effective decisions from a comprehensive array of pertinent options.

Failures usually attract attention because they can adversely affect output, safety, environmental health, quality of end-product, customer service, competitiveness and unit cost.  The severity and frequency with which a failure leads to these consequences dictate which failure management technique is worth applying.  Therefore, the mission statement should acknowledge the key role of ‘consequence avoidance’ in maintenance.  The policy should be effective in the use of resources (i.e. people, materials, spares, tools, etc).  Hence, the cost of maintenance depends not only on the maintenance staff, but also on the designers and operators of the considered manufacturing system.  In the present high-stress, turbulent business environment, well-run organization strive continually to enhance their capability to create excellent value for the customers by improving the cost effectiveness of the operations.  Maintenance is thus vital support function in business, especially as increasingly large investments are being required in physical assets [Tsang and Jardine, 2000).

Advance manufacturing techniques (AMTs) among which are Just-in-time[JIT] etc,   has great effect in any manufacturing industry.  Just-in-time (JIT) is a techniques for reducing waste through procedures that established good communication throughout the production process to ensure that all resources are used optimally while total quality management (TPM) is a practice whereby an organization is quality-oriented i.e. every employee and management are involved in ensuring quality throughout the organization.

Total productive-maintenance (TPM) is a proven and successful procedure for introducing maintenance consideration into organizational activities.  It involves operational and maintenance staff working together as a team to reduce wastage, minimize downtime and improve end-product quality.  It needs active well-focused maintenance staff, even when the system is perceived to be working as expected.  TPM builds on the concepts of just-in-time (JIT), total quality management (TQM) and design to achieve minimum life-cycle cost (LCC).  It has spread from manufacturing to process  industries, and possesses the potential to be used in people management as well as generally for improved resource-use.

Many industries in Nigeria operate productively for less than 50 percent of even the nominally – functioning hours per year.  Part of this embarrassment is caused by high down time, supply failures for input resources, and low spare-capacity to cope with sudden high demand.

Total productive maintenance (TPM) focuses on optimizing planning and scheduling.  Availability, performance and yield (i.e. acceptable quality-rate) are other factors that affect productivity (Bekkers, 2002).  Availability losses result from breakdowns and change-overs, i.e. the situation in which the line is not running when it should be. Performance losses arises from speed losses and small stops or idling or empty positions.  In this case, the line may be running, but it is not producing the quantity it should.  Yield losses consist of losses due to rejects and poor startup behaviour in the line producing the products.  These losses lead to low values of the overall equipment’s effectiveness (OEE), which provides an indication of how effective the production process is.  TPM helps to raise the value of the OEE by supplying a structure to facilitate the assessment of those losses, and subsequently giving priority to dealing with the more serious offenders.  Application of TPM leads to both short and long-term improvement.

Together with the increasing complexity and rising cost of such equipment, there has been an upsurge in the intensity of its utilization.  Our expectation for higher and better output has made the need for total productive maintenance inevitable.

1.1   AIMS AND OBJECTIVE

The aim of TPM is to bring together management, supervisors and trade union members to take rapid remedial actions as and when required.  The main objective of this project is to suggest possible ways of effective implementation of TPM for maximum overall equipment effectiveness, which will lead to the achievement of zero breakdowns, zero defects and improved throughputs by:

-                     Increasing operator involvement and ownership of the process.

-                     Improving problem-solving by the team.

-                     Refining preventive and predictive maintenance activities.

-                     Focusing on reliability and maintainability engineering.

-                     Upgrading each operator’s skill in manufacturing industry.

1.2       METHODOLOGY

A case study of Delta Steel company (Pellet Plant) was used.

Secondary source (i.e. existing internal record) were used to collect data on downtime, uptime (operating time), total number of oxide pellet produce, quality product from their production report sheet in order to determine, mean time between failure (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR) and the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of the plant which serve as model for effective implementation of TPM.

1.3   SCOPE/LIMITATION OF STUDY

The study is limited to pellet plant and it gives details about a time based stepwise implementation plan of TPM.  Techniques such as Autonomous Maintenance plan, 5s, team problem solving and benchmarking which are pre-requisite to the achievement of TPM are introduce to boost their maintenance practices.

Inability of the company to release the current data on delays, operating time etc with a sole reason that management has not set to deliberate on it, was my major limitation.

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