Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a series of methods that ensure every piece of equipment in a production process is always able to perform its required tasks so that production is never interrupted. It is a comprehensive, team-based, continuous activity that enhances normal equipment-maintenance activities and involves every worker. TPM focuses on eliminating:

• Downtime
• Performance Losses
• Yield Losses

All flow of the product and ‘lean manufacturing’ improvements are impossible to achieve if there is a lot of equipment downtime. Eliminating downtime becomes a shared goal for the plant and the organization and it is achieved by:

• Improving equipment condition (original condition)
• Shifting some basic maintenance to production (autonomous maintenance)
• Improving and sustaining preventative maintenance (PM program and schedules)
• Creating teams to solve problems (continuous improvement)