ABSTRACT
Like all activities designed to revitalize organizations, total productive maintenance's (TPM) goal is to improve corporate business results and create cheerful and productive work-places. Focused improvement includes all activities that maximize the overall effectiveness of equipment, processes, and plants through uncompromising elimination of losses and improvement of performance. Focused improvement aims to eliminate all kinds of losses. Assessing the results achieved through focused improvement requires teams to evaluate the six production outputs (PQCDSM) as quantitatively as possible. A major feature of TPM is its "zero-orientation", which encourages teams systematically to reduce all kinds of losses to zero. Focused improvements go more smoothly if responsible team members learn basic analytical techniques in advance by reading books or attending seminars. Analytical techniques are tools for pinpointing all the causes of failures, quality defects, and so on from among large numbers of complex, interrelated phenomena. They may end up requiring a high level of specific engineering technology.
