Overview

Put all machinery in the best possible condition, keep it that way, and insist on absolute cleanliness everywhere in order that a man may learn to respect his tools, his surroundings, and himself.

Henry Ford, Today and Tomorrow

A recent experience at one of Beta's large discrete parts manufacturing plants shows how combining Total Productive Maintenance, ^[1] or TPM, and Reliability-Centered Maintenance, ^[2], ^[3], ^[4] or RCM increased teamwork between the maintenance and production functions, improved equipment reliability and uptime, and lowered operating costs. Among the tools applied at Beta's Allen Central plant are TPM, with a particular focus on operator care and minor PM, or as some people would say, TLC "Tender Loving Care" in the form of actions such as Tightening, Lubricating, and Cleaning. Other tools are also being introduced and applied in an integrated way, including continuous improvement teams, improved cell design, pull systems, process mapping, etc., but the focus of this case history is how TPM was integrated with RCM. ^[5]

The application of TPM at this plant, and other plants, has focused most of its attention on operator PM and basic care, operator "condition monitoring," etc. These practices are essential for assuring manu-facturing excellence, but used alone are not likely to be sufficient. In this case, the focus on TPM did not adequately consider other, perhaps equally valid or even more advanced, methodologies, such as reliability-centered maintenance, predictive maintenance, root cause analysis, maintenance planning, etc. This view was confirmed...