Staff working for home appliances producer Arctic will be able to change the oil of the machinery they’re operating and perform other similar repair tasks if their equipment breaks down. The company hopes that these working practices will generate a 50% increase in productivity by 2006.
Arctic is banking on the introduction of the Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) concept, created by Japanese managers, whereby workers involved in the production process are responsible for the maintenance of machinery they use.
Workers are trained in the functioning of machinery and are able to perform common operations without awaiting the intervention of a maintenance team. Interruptions in the functioning of machinery are thus reduced and productivity rises. A similar thing is observable in the case of employees working with a computer: the more they know about computers, the faster and the better they work.
Arctic’s TPM implementation programme will unfold over a three-year period and, by 2006, the company hopes it will have achieved a 50% productivity increase, together with a 30% reduction in maintenance costs.
The concept of total productive maintenance was developed in Japan in the early ’80s and implemented in the domain of industrial production. At present, the concept is promoted by the Japanese Plant Maintenance Institute, whose manager, Takashi Koizumi, is one of the concept’s founders.
TPM targets “zero accidents, zero deficiencies and zero failures,” finally leading to “zero losses.”
In 2002, Arctic was taken over by the Turkish company Arcelik, which has applied TPM since 1997. Arctic decided to embrace the concept in October 2003, and the project was effectively launched early this year.