ABSTRACT
TPM is originally a Ford idea (traced back to Henry Ford in the early 1900s), but it was borrowed and fine-tuned by the Japanese in the 1950s when preventive maintenance was introduced into Japan from the United States. Nippondenso, part of Toyota, was the first company in Japan to introduce plantwide preventive maintenance in 1960. In preventive maintenance, operators produced goods using machines, and the maintenance group was dedicated to the work of maintaining those machines. However, with the high level of automation of Nippondenso, maintenance became a problem because so many more maintenance personnel were now required. So, the management decided that the routine maintenance of equipment would now be carried out by the operators themselves. (This is autonomous maintenance, one of the features of TPM.) The maintenance group then focused only on “maintenance” works for upgrades.
