12 ways to implement a TPM program using your work orders

October 27, 2020

| 4 min read

12 ways to implement a TPM strategy using your work orders

Read the full work order academy series, including toolkits for better maintenance schedules, defeating backlog, using work order data, and more

What happens when the maintenance team is the only one that cares about maintenance?

There might not be a more common, or truer, saying in the world of sports than, “Defense wins championships.”

Although there are no championships to win in business, there are quotas to hit and money to make. And defense still matters. In this case, defense means maintenance. But when the maintenance team is the only one playing defense, they’re outnumbered and the losses pile up.

A faulty part goes unnoticed and causes a breakdown. That’s a loss. A machine isn’t lubricated properly which results in waste. Loss. A PM is missed and an accident happens. Another loss.

But a lot of these losses can be avoided with total productive maintenance. Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a defense-first mentality for business. The work order process is one of the cornerstones of this strategy. This article will explore how to create and optimize that process with TPM in mind.

What is total productive maintenance: A brief primer on TPM

Total productive maintenance is the idea that everyone has a part to play in improving the performance and quality of systems with maintenance. That includes the maintenance team, but also operations, production, finance, and other departments. When you have 100 eyes peeled for possible equipment failures or safety hazards instead of five or 10, they’re easier and more efficient to catch and fix.

An example of TPM in action would be an operator doing routine maintenance, like basic lubrication, or a plant manager creating an asset management policy. Neither person is on the maintenance team, but both use maintenance to have a direct impact on the health and performance of equipment.

There’s a lot more to TPM than we can fit in this article. If you want to read more, check out these articles on getting started with TPM and putting a TPM plan into action.

12 ways to use work orders to build a successful TPM program

How to get operations involved TPM

Work orders are the bread and butter of maintenance which also makes them essential for a good TPM program and getting operators involved in maintenance success.

  1. Find a starting line: Work out the wrinkles in your TPM program by starting small. Focus on one machine or area of your plant. Look for equipment with a low criticality that requires regularly scheduled maintenance. Split the responsibility of the PM between maintenance and operations.
  2. Designate a maintenance type for operators: This creates clear roles and responsibilities and allows you to track where extra training, information, or resources are needed to help operators be successful.
  3. Write bullet-proof work request templates: Be very clear about what information is needed to help technicians complete a job. Operators will gain a better understanding and appreciation for what goes into maintenance.
    Learn how to create world-class work orders
  4. Write a template for completion notes that leaves no room for error: Break this section of a work order into specific fields that helps you document exactly what happened on the job. Operators will be able to spot useful information in past work orders much easier. It will also make training requirements easier to create.
  5. Build solid task lists: Find a balance between being detailed in your tasks and overwhelming operators with too much. Adding pictures helps you avoid information overload. Providing estimated times for each task is an extra bit of guidance that operators will appreciate.
  6. Add as many visual aids to work orders as you can: In addition to pictures, add diagrams or videos if your operators are accessing the work order from a mobile device.
  7. Highlight success with work order data: There might be resistance to your TPM program at first. There’s a lot of data in your work orders that help you prove that it’s worth it. Even something as simple as having fewer reactive work orders tells a story. Fewer breakdowns mean more throughput and less waste from post-failure startups.

How to get the rest of your organization involved in your plan

  1. A true total productive maintenance strategy doesn’t stop at the edge of the production floor. It reaches into the offices of almost everyone at your company. Here are a few ways you can start bringing more and more people into the TPM fold.
  2. Assist in the design and/or procurement: Use common maintenance types and failure codes, along with request and completion notes, to help reliability and purchasing personnel build or buy equipment that won’t repeat the failures of past assets.
  3. Advocate for more resources: Presenting a list of backlogged work orders, its labor hours, and the cost of not doing the work can help you highlight the scale of problems and convince your boss that you need some extra help.
    Learn how to conquer your maintenance backlog
  4. Make maintenance accessible: Integrate your work order request system with the systems that everyone in your business uses, like email or Slack.
  5. Identify inventory efficiencies: Use work order data to find out if the same parts cause breakdowns or failed inspections. Work with inventory personnel to find the root cause of the problem and solve it.
  6. Celebrate your success: If you want people to care about maintenance, you need to prove it’s worth their attention. Work orders are a great source of success stories. They can help you draw a link between scheduled maintenance and failure prevention or clean start ups and higher production.

Learn how to use work order data to highlight you team’s success

Everything you just read in three sentences

  1. Talk with members of every group using work orders, from requesters in finance to operators, and find out how to make instructions and templates clear and accessible to each of them.
  2. Piloting your TPM strategy on a small area of your organization will help you identify where it needs to be improved and how to scale the project moving forward.
  3. Tracking good results from your work orders, no matter how small, will increase buy-in for your TPM program, or, in other words, bragging is the surest path to success.

Read part VII, How to make your maintenance team better with work order data

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