Guidelines for investments in Total Productive Maintenance

Competitive pressures and changing production management paradigms have, in recent years, increased the importance of reliable and consistent production equipment. Initially the Japanese, and now others, have espoused the virtues of a management philosophy identified as Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). The techniques involved with this philosophy result in significant cost reductions through decreased unplanned downtime of machinery and also more prompt repair when machinery does fail.;This dissertation: (1) Presents a framework relating the paradigms of Just-in-Time (JIT), Total Quality Management (TQM), Total Productive Maintenance and Employee Involvement (EI); (2) Provides a practitioner's framework to describe current research gaps in the area of TPM; (3) Develops and analyzes models that provide guidelines for investing in TPM activities, including (a) The optimal investment in planned autonomous maintenance to simultaneously reduce the unplanned downtime and inventory investment as well as to provide quicker and more accurate response to marketplace demands; (b) The optimal maintenance policies to reduce maintenance costs when both periodic and predictive maintenance are utilized.;The dissertation is organized as follows. In Chapter 1, I describe the motivation for this research and provide an introduction to the problems studied in this dissertation. Chapter 2 presents an overview of TPM development and also provides a framework for the implementation of TPM. Chapter 3 identifies the gaps in the TPM literature and provides justification for this dissertation research. The two subsequent chapters formulate and solve the models described above and provide managerial insights into optimal maintenance investment policies. The last chapter provides a summary of the results and suggestions for future research.