Wastage Control, Total productive Maintenance, Energy Audit

The management and control of the resources used in most commercial organisations leaves a great deal to be desired. Waste is growing at such an enormous rate that it has spawned a new industry for recycling and extracting useful materials.

Materials are wasted in a number of ways such as effluents, breakage, contamination, inefficient storage, poor workmanship, low quality, pilfering and obsolescence. All these contribute to significantly increased material costs and all can be controlled by efficient working methods and effective control.

Total productive Maintenance

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) was developed by Seiichi Nakajima in Japan between 1950 and 1970. This experience led to the recognition that a leadership mindset engaging front line teams in small group improvement activity is an essential element of effective operation. The outcome of his work was the application of the TPM process in 1971.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) started as a method of physical asset management focused on maintaining and improving manufacturing machinery, in order to reduce the operating cost to an organization. After the PM award was created and awarded to Nippon Denso in 1971, the JIPM (Japanese Institute of Plant Maintenance), expanded it to include 8 pillars of TPM that required involvement from all areas of manufacturing in the concepts of lean Manufacturing.

Total productive maintenance (TPM) is the process of using machines, equipment, employees and supporting processes to maintain and improve the integrity of production and the quality of systems. Put simply, it’s the process of getting employees involved in maintaining their own equipment while emphasizing proactive and preventive maintenance techniques. Total productive maintenance strives for perfect production. That is:

• No breakdowns
• No stops or running slowly
• No defects
• No accidents

TPM is designed to disseminate the responsibility for maintenance and machine performance, improving employee engagement and teamwork within management, engineering, maintenance, and operations.

Principles

The eight pillars of TPM are mostly focused on proactive and preventive techniques for improving equipment reliability:

• Autonomous Maintenance: Operators who use all of their senses to help identify causes for losses
• Focused Improvement: Scientific approach to problem solving to eliminate losses from the factory
• Planned Maintenance: Professional maintenance activities performed by trained mechanics and engineers
• Quality management: Scientific and statistical approach to identifying defects and eliminating the cause of them
• Early/equipment management: Scientific introduction of equipment and design concepts that eliminate losses and make it easier to make defect free production efficienly.
• Education and Training: Support to continuous improvement of knowledge of all workers and management
• Administrative & office TPM: Using TPM tools to improve all the support aspects of a manufacturing plant including production scheduling, materials management and information flow, As well as increasing moral of individuals and offering awards to well deserving employees for increasing their morals.
• Safety Health Environmental condition’s

The main objective of TPM is to increase the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of plant equipment. TPM addresses the causes for accelerated deterioration and production losses while creating the correct environment between operators and equipment to create ownership.

OEE has three factors which are multiplied to give one measure called OEE

Performance x Availability x Quality = OEE

Each factor has two associated losses making 6 in total, these 6 losses are as follows:

Performance = (1) running at reduced speed – (2) Minor Stops

Availability = (3) Breakdowns – (4) Product changeover

Quality = (5) Startup rejects – (6) Running rejects

Implementation

Following are the steps involved by the implementation of TPM in an organization:

• Initial evaluation of TPM level,
• Introductory Education and Propaganda (IEP) for TPM,
• Formation of TPM committee,
• Development of a master plan for TPM implementation,
• Stage by stage training to the employees and stakeholders on all eight pillars of TPM,
• Implementation preparation process,
• Establishing the TPM policies and goals and development of a road map for TPM implementation.

Benefits of Total Productive Maintenance
Direct Benefits	Indirect Benefits
Less unplanned downtime resulting in an increase in OEE	Increase in employee confidence levels
Reduction in customer complaints	Produces a clean, orderly workplace
Reduction in workplace accidents	Increase in positive attitudes among employees through a sense of ownership
Reduction in manufacturing costs	Pollution control measures are followed
Increase in product quality	Cross-departmental shared knowledge and experience

Pillars of TPM

TPM in administration: A good TPM program is only as good as the sum of its parts. Total productive maintenance should look beyond the plant floor by addressing and eliminating areas of waste in administrative functions. This means supporting production by improving things like order processing, procurement and scheduling. Administrative functions are often the first step in the entire manufacturing process, so it’s important they are streamlined and waste-free. For example, if order-processing procedures become more streamlined, then material gets to the plant floor quicker and with fewer errors, eliminating potential downtime while missing parts are tracked down.

Safety, health and environment: Maintaining a safe working environment means employees can perform their tasks in a safe place without health risks. It’s important to produce an environment that makes production more efficient, but it should not be at the risk of an employee’s safety and health. To achieve this, any solutions introduced in the TPM process should always consider safety, health and the environment.

Training and education: Lack of knowledge about equipment can derail a TPM program. Training and education applies to operators, managers and maintenance personnel. They are intended to ensure everyone is on the same page with the TPM process and to address any knowledge gaps so TPM goals are achievable. This is where operators learn skills to proactively maintain equipment and identify emerging problems. The maintenance team learns how to implement a proactive and preventive maintenance schedule, and managers become well-versed in TPM principles, employee development and coaching.

Early equipment management: The TPM pillar of early equipment management takes the practical knowledge and overall understanding of manufacturing equipment acquired through total productive maintenance and uses it to improve the design of new equipment. Designing equipment with the input of people who use it most allows suppliers to improve maintainability and the way in which the machine operates in future designs.

Quality maintenance: All the maintenance planning and strategizing in the world is all for naught if the quality of the maintenance being performed is inadequate. The quality maintenance pillar focuses on working design error detection and prevention into the production process.

Planned maintenance: Planned maintenance involves studying metrics like failure rates and historical downtime and then scheduling maintenance tasks based around these predicted or measured failure rates or downtime periods. In other words, since there is a specific time to perform maintenance on equipment, you can schedule maintenance around the time when equipment is idle or producing at low capacity, rarely interrupting production.

Focused improvement: Focused improvement is based around the Japanese term “kaizen,” meaning “improvement.” In manufacturing, kaizen requires improving functions and processes continually. Focused improvement looks at the process as a whole and brainstorms idea for how to improve it. Getting small teams in the mindset of proactively working together to implement regular, incremental improvements to processes pertaining to equipment operation is key for TPM. Diversifying team members allows for the identification of recurring problems through cross-functional brainstorming. It also combines input from across the company so teams can see how processes affect different departments.

Autonomous maintenance: Autonomous maintenance means ensuring your operators are fully trained on routine maintenance like cleaning, lubricating and inspecting, as well as placing that responsibility solely in their hands. This gives machine operators a feeling of ownership of their equipment and increases their knowledge of the particular piece of equipment. It also guarantees the machinery is always clean and lubricated, helps identify issues before they become failures, and frees up maintenance staff for higher-level tasks.

Energy Audit

An energy audit is an inspection survey and an analysis of energy flows for energy conservation in a building. It may include a process or system to reduce the amount of energy input into the system without negatively affecting the output. In commercial and industrial real estate, an energy audit is the first step in identifying opportunities to reduce energy expense and carbon footprint.

When looking to the existing audit methodologies developed in IEA EBC Annex 11, by ASHRAE and by Krarti (2000), it appears that the main issues of an audit process are:

• The analysis of building and utility data, including study of the installed equipment and analysis of energy bills;
• The survey of the real operating conditions;
• The understanding of the building behaviour and of the interactions with weather, occupancy and operating schedules;
• The selection and the evaluation of energy conservation measures;
• The estimation of energy saving potential;
• The identification of customer concerns and needs.

Generally, four levels of analysis can be outlined (ASHRAE):

• Level 0: Benchmarking: This first analysis consists in a preliminary Whole Building Energy Use (WBEU) analysis based on the analysis of the historic utility use and costs and the comparison of the performances of the buildings to those of similar buildings. This benchmarking of the studied installation allows determining if further analysis is required.
• Level I: Walk-through audit: Preliminary analysis made to assess building energy efficiency to identify not only simple and low-cost improvements but also a list of energy conservation measures (ECMs, or energy conservation opportunities, ECOs) to orient the future detailed audit. This inspection is based on visual verifications, study of installed equipment and operating data and detailed analysis of recorded energy consumption collected during the benchmarking phase;
• Level II: Detailed/General energy audit: Based on the results of the pre-audit, this type of energy audit consists in energy use survey in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of the studied installation, a more detailed analysis of the facility, a breakdown of the energy use and a first quantitative evaluation of the ECOs/ECMs selected to correct the defects or improve the existing installation. This level of analysis can involve advanced on-site measurements and sophisticated computer-based simulation tools to evaluate precisely the selected energy retrofits;
• Level III: Investment-Grade audit: Detailed Analysis of Capital-Intensive Modifications focusing on potential costly ECOs requiring rigorous engineering study.