A survey on factors affecting total productive maintenance (TPM) in service industries

In today’s competitive environment, manufacturing plants need outstanding maintenance strategies to enhance the availability of machines, to decrease the cost of production and to manufacture parts with exceptional quality and dimensional accuracy. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a modern maintenance strategy which aims to maximize the equipment effectiveness by targeting to accomplish zero breakdowns, zero accidents, zero wastes and zero defects. TPM involves complete involvement of all employees from the top management to shop floor. This work is limited to small and medium scale industries only and is carried out with the help of a questionnaire consisting of 15 important queries pertaining to TPM implementation. The questionnaire is given to 75 industries from service domain, out of which 45 responses have been obtained. All 45 responses are considered for the study. The respondents include chief executives, engineers, general managers and supervisors who are randomly selected. The respondent’s responses are rated on a five-point Likert scale. The results are analysed with the help of simple graphs and inferences are drawn after thorough interpretation. It has been found that 38% of the service industries (17 out of 45) are using TPM and 28 industries have not yet implemented TPM. This work reveals the level of TPM usage in selected industries and identifies the factors contributing to the non-implementation of TPM.