Experiences of Implementing TPM in Swedish Industries

The global marketplace is highly competitive and organisations, who want to survive long-term, have to continuously improve, change and adapt in response to market demands. These improvements should focus on cost cutting, increasing productivity levels and quality and guaranteeing deliveries in order to satisfy customers. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is one method, which can be used to achieve these goals. TPM is a change management approach that involves employees from both production and maintenance departments. The purpose is to eliminate major production losses by introducing a program of continuous and systematic improvements to production equipment. TPM should be developed and expanded to embrace the whole organisation and all employees should be involved in the process as members of improvement teams. This paper gives a short description of the development of TPM and the TPM implementation process. Findings are reported from a case study in which one of the authors had the possibility of following and guiding a company through their TPM implementation. The implementation process takes several years and the research has focused on the initial three years. The study demonstrates that driving forces, obstacles and difficulties often are dependent on the organisation, its managers and the individual employees.