Know-How Exchange : Other

Hi Gilbert

TPM as I know it has little to do with marketing, so, if I am correct you might not get many insights into it from this site.

TPM is the practice of maximizing manufacturing or process productivity by minimizing, amongst other things, downtime, inefficiency, quality problems and algorithmic programming bugs in SCADA systems. Unless you include neo-Stalinist pieces of ERP software, this process rarely involves the marketing function.

When it does impact on marketing, such as in the overall implementation of quality standards such as ISO 9000, it’s impact is restricted to looking at how systems in sales and marketing lead to failures in the manufacturing process, such as crappy sales forecasting leading to an insufficiency of parts needed to build the things that the customers actually buy, rather than what they were projected to buy! Or poor sales specifications leading to engineering producing quotations which don’t meet the client’s needs or are unbuildable in the time scale or at the cost quoted.

So if you are looking to learn about TPM and presumably manage it’s implementations in your company, you are going to have to start to learn about it rather quickly. I'd advise you not to. See my comments later for my reasons why.

Firstly, whilst the principals are similar, the practice is very different for various branches of manufacturing or process industries. For example, if you want to apply it to hydraulics, you could look to a hydraulic control and actuation company, like Festo. They have a whole series of courses on their website under didactics (Isn’t it wonderful how a German company can manage to use such a precise term for teaching a course – sit up at the back and listen!)

https://www.festo.com/INetDomino/files_01/FitforTPM.pdf

Gives you an insight into course content, but you’ll have to sign up to learn the details!

Dr Sengupta and his associates have a natty explanation of what TPM actually is, but surprise, surprise; they want you to sign up to a course to learn all about it.

https://www.drsga.com/Files/Total%20Productivity%20Maintanance.htm

No one has mentioned the magic Kaizen (Japanese for continuous improvement) which is usually seen to be quality orientated, but a lot of it is based on incremental process excellence and the maintenance of the same.

Typically, in the UK, you are looking at £500 for a 1 day course in TPM, Kaizen and Lean Manufacturing techniques which should just about equip you to bluff your way to the next stage. https://www.topqservices.com/ gives you a reasonable example.

As you can see, precious little to do with marketing, except tangentially. If you really want to explore the marketing aspects, you have to go the Big Brother Himself, SAP, the big daddy of ERP systems. I’m a bit of a fan of SAP, but some of the applications defy gravity, physics, economics and mathematics.

However, there, under the headings of asset management and process optimisation, you will find that marketing is dragged into the ERP and TPM mix. Now I know that this is theoretically possible, in the same way as a two month, accurate, localised weather forecast is possible. If you cover the planet in enough weather stations, with enough accuracy and ask the butterflies to stop screwing up the results (James Gleick, Chaos Theory, wing beat of a butterfly’s effect on hurricanes)

If you have the time, have a look at:

https://www11.sap.com/industries/utilities/pdf/SAP_Reprint1.pdf

Seriously, I think that you are putting yourself at great professional risk. If you take on a subject as complex and involved as TPM, which companies such as Toyota and Sony devote entire departments to, you will be heading for a fall. It would be much better to acknowledge that your strengths lie somewhere else and to hire an ISO 9000 consultant with TPM experience to guide you through the process. If you try to do it and get it wrong, you might not only wreck your own reputation but wreck your company’s ability to make things.

Sorry not to give you the answer you were probably looking for, but we’re not well known here for wilfully misleading people.

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions