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There's a widespread perception that TPM (total productive maintenance) is a long slog that turns your hair grey and only shows real, measurable results after three years or more. As a result, a lot of businesses never finish what they started. I made the big mistake of repeating this to DAK Consulting's Dennis McCarthy, co-author of Lean TPM, a Blueprint for Change. The resulting eruption rivalled Krakatoa. Suffice it to say that he believes any business satisfied with that rate of progress will get as little as it deserves. McCarthy says expectations are often pitched lower than they ought to be because TPM is often seen merely as operator or autonomous maintenance - to him, only 20% of the TPM toolkit and something that doesn't deliver much benefit on its own. "You also need to raise planned maintenance standards and the quality of education and training to support any transfer of routine activities from maintenance to production." McCarthy adds: "In addition, to get a payback from TPM, the focus should be improving overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). This requires leadership and direction to convert the capacity created through improved OEE into business benefits because typically that means changing management and maintenance roles." DAK ran a four-day TPM workshop for a major pharma company which generated £250,000 in added value by day three. It cost less than £5,000, creating a payback of around one week. McCarthy admits this sort of rate of return is unusual but points to a recent programme in part of 3M to incorporate TPM within its Lean Sigma continuous improvement (CI) process. It led to a 10% increase in OEE - and therefore capacity - in around one month. "Typically those organisations which do it right produce an increase in capacity of around 50% over three years," he explains. "Assuming a gross margin of 50%, that is an increase in net profits of between 50 and 200%, depending on whether you can sell the additional capacity. One of the major paybacks from TPM is the management and specialist time released from firefighting and frontline problem solving. If this time is reinvested in proactive business improvement, the payback is measured in months if not days." McCarthy paints a very attractive picture but how easy is it to achieve steady, incremental gains in practice? Impossible if you don't start right. Suiko's Andy Spooner says any move into TPM has to be seen as compatible with - and integrated into - the normal way of working. There's a parallel between poor adoptions of 5S and TPM. "People go through the motions but don't get why they are doing it." He points out that TPM is not the end goal - it's merely a tool to support you in reaching a business objective. "The TPM programmes that are working are those with a clear link between the activities taking place and the results being delivered. But if people see it as a maintenance or equipment related thing, rather than engaging all functions, you will never get the best out of it." Linpac Packaging's adoption of TPM on its St Helens site proves the effectiveness of this dual focus on engagement and results. Operations manager Chris Wright has piloted previous companies through TPM and has a very firm understanding of what works and what doesn't. First on his hit list is the concept of TPM as a standalone 'initiative'. In St Helens, TPM is part and parcel of a strategy of lean, continuous improvement focused on areas where change will clearly bring the biggest bottom-line benefits. "I would warn anyone embarking on TPM that you need a reason to change. If you are just doing it because you think it's the thing to do, it isn't going to last. And the key to progressing both TPM and lean is the engagement, involvement and accountability of the workforce. If you try to push in new tools and techniques without having them on board, you are equally destined to fail." Similarly, he is adamant that it is pointless jumping into planned maintenance if the place is filthy and hasn't got the discipline of 5S. "Orderliness, engagement and all the other 5S principles are essential. Sometimes people jump into the complex without getting the simple, basic things right. If you get those right, the complex things will fall into place almost by themselves." Although he believes that everyone must understand they are in for the long haul, tangible early successes are essential. "Focus on the vital few - the things that are going to give you the biggest payback and the quick wins. It grabs hearts and minds in the senior stakeholders and the board, and gets buy-in if you need investment. The philosophy is a journey that may take years but - within that - you can still get some really quick, important paybacks." Let's look at St Helens' approach to TPM in more detail. When Wright came on board nearly three years ago, the site - working with Suiko - already had the lean foundations securely in place. The workforce had also been trained in TPM but it was not yet embedded in their daily routines and behaviour. At St Helens, the shopfloor works in cell-based teams with no separate engineering and production staff. Wright's very straightforward approach centres on upskilling the workforce and simplifying the equipment. He carries fundamental lean principles like visual management into TPM, making remedial actions obvious and foolproof - like a plug that will only go in one way - so it doesn't take highly skilled engineers to handle the majority of the work. "Instead you bring your workforce's skill level up through education. Where there is ownership, accountability and engagement, you don't need that separate team," he explains. He admits that sometimes they get caught out and it means calling in extra expertise. "But that's an opportunity to find out what you need to do to prevent it ever happening again. It's driving change all the way through - the same principle that works in kaizen and CI." Wright's other mandatory requirement for TPM is a good assessment process. Wright is a wholehearted believer that what gets measured gets done. Each area of the factory measures its current state of ownership and involvement, OEE, current condition, equipment care, problem prevention measures and their effectiveness. They then develop their own 18-24 month roadmap of where they are going and how. The local manager sets the targets for achieving it. Wright reviews it with them quarterly: "You have a key stake in the ground and measures, with KPIs set against your enablers and your process to drive performance." Instead of things being done on an ad hoc basis, the measurement cycle provides a structured approach for focusing on the priorities. The detailed information is invaluable for pinpointing the bottleneck processes and therefore the quick wins. "Once you've won the hearts and minds by making a real difference to the bottlenecks, that sense of engagement will go across the whole business." Put simply, bottlenecks impede the ability to meet any growth in demand. By improving machine performance, equipment runs for longer, output is increased and more likely to be right first time and thus the business can sell all it makes. In the first year of TPM, St Helens took OEE in a key extrusion process from 69% to 74%. "That will realise £100k on the bottom line - and it doesn't take a great investment to do it," says Wright. "Some of it is really low-hanging fruit." Each target for improvement is then broken down into small, bite-sized chunks with the full involvement of the cell team. The team leader is tasked to be responsible for each team's delivery of a minimum of six improvements from 15 shift teams in the first year. Last year that stacked up to a hefty 137 improvements across the site - 52% ahead of target - and this year the total will be double that. "We have a weekly stand up review in each area," explains Wright. "We ask if we have done what we said we would do in the previous week, and what we are going to do in the next. We also ask what are the obstacles to delivery. I attend virtually every review. It lets people know in only 10 to 15 minutes what we are going to do, the reason for doing it, its importance and what the benefits are to the business." What constitutes an obstacle to delivery? Wright says it might be a training issue, solved by coaching the extra skills. But they also look hard at the simple things: "If something is not obvious, how do we make it obvious? If there is a gauge, can we paint it green and red so they can see when it's right or wrong? What's likely to fail? If you can't see it, let's put Perspex patches on so you can see it without having to stop the machine. It's all about buy in. They are running this equipment 24/7 - not me - and they are the people who will know when something is wrong." He says he is not looking for a complete cost-benefit analysis; just for improvements that remove the "time-stealers and the demotivators". He illustrates the effectiveness of this approach through a simple example. The regular overheating of a chiller unit was a constant frustration. The resource consumed in repairing it made it a classic time-stealer. When the team really looked into it, however, they realised that some of the pipework was routed through an area of direct heat. So they rerouted it, not just to a cool area but one where they could easily monitor it as they passed by. It never failed after that and - for a cost of about £50 - they saved thousands. The benefits of good TPM spin out into so many areas. For example, Wright sees a direct correlation between reactive maintenance and accidents. "If you are in breakdown mode, you are under pressure for production and you are trying to fix things fast. If you improve your breakdowns and unplanned failures, you will reduce your accidents. We reduced our total accidents for the site from 35 in 2007 to five last year. And lost time accidents have gone down from 12 to one. It's not just TPM - it's changing the mindset to accept that things are their responsibility and no one else's - and then challenging them to make a difference." Over three years, St Helens has made a 35-40% OEE improvement in previously bottlenecked areas, directly contributing to bottom-line growth. Wright is totally convinced that the main driver is employee engagement coupled to clear performance measurement. How hard is it to create that sense of involvement? "It doesn't happen overnight," says Wright. "Some are keen but the significant mass will wait to see which way it goes. It takes a lot of drive and focus and talking the same story over and over again. Every quarter I get out on my soapbox and give the talk. And I am consistent; I am out on the shopfloor constantly finding out if we are doing what we say we are going to do and keeping our focus on the things that really matter."