An Integrated Approach to TPM and Six Sigma Development in the Castings Industry.

Both Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Six Sigma are key business process strategies which are employed by companies to enhance their manufacturing performance. However, whilst there is significant research information available on implementing these systems in a sequential manner, there is little information available relating to the integration of these approaches to provide a single and highly effective strategy for change in companies.

This paper proposes an integrated approach to TPM and Six Sigma which was developed as a result of work undertaken in the castings industry. The effectiveness of the approach is subsequently evaluated highlighting the benefits the host organization received through this new approach by measuring the effects of implementation against the seven Quality, Cost and Delivery (QCD) measures.

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Submitted by soroka on Fri, 30/06/2006 - 7:45am.
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An Integrated Aproach to TPM and Six Sigma

Submitted by iwilliams on Sun, 09/07/2006 - 1:51pm.

Dear Authors, thank you for your paper. What are the most critical factors involved in changing business processes so the integration of TPM and Six Sigma is part of an organisation's processes and people character?

Thank you.

TPM Six Sigma

Submitted by Thomas on Mon, 10/07/2006 - 9:29pm.

Thanks for your message.

Certainly in this case study the major enabler was that of people power. Enabling and empowering the people on the shop floor was critical to the development of the project.

Prior to this however was the need for senior management to realise that their markets were not as secure as they first thought and this was the focus for change to occur.

Integrating TPM with Six Sigma

Submitted by iwilliams on Tue, 11/07/2006 - 6:47am.

Thank you for your reply. Can you give more information on how the tools of Six Sigma interact with the pillars of TPM to enhance manufacturing performance?

Thank you.

Six sigma approach

Submitted by tony fouweather on Tue, 11/07/2006 - 10:17am.

Hello Andrew
very interesting application of six sigma.

Were the companies already familiar with the DMAIC approach before they started working on TPM?
Do you find that the companies prefered using the structured DMAIC approach applied to TPM?
Do they find it easier to apply TPM following the six sigma strategy?

Thank you for your time
tony

Monitoring costs

Submitted by Brousseau on Wed, 12/07/2006 - 5:06pm.

Dear authors,

To be honest, I am not familiar with this kind of study but I found that your paper presented the integrated approach to TPM and Six Sigma in a way that is easy to follow. In the conclusion, you mentioned that the monitoring costs can be greater than first expected and that, this in turn can affect the true savings of the project. I imagine that in theory, it is possible for such monitoring costs to be even higher than the true savings of the project. Could this be the case and do you know of such examples?

Emmanuel

Integrating TPM wih Six Sigma

Submitted by Thomas on Wed, 12/07/2006 - 5:32pm.

The company had no real grip on either TPM or Six Sigma. Due to this we decided to split the programme into distinct stages. Autonomous Maintenace was the first stage of the programme and in this case we decided to look at the six big losses and OEE analysis to start with.

The Six Sigma DMAIC approach was used as a mechanism to implement the stages of Autonomous Maintenance. This allows for the company to implement six sigma and TPM simultaneously

Six Sigma Approach

Submitted by Thomas on Wed, 12/07/2006 - 5:37pm.

Hi Tony

No the company had no idea of the Six Sigma approach. Being a USA owned company they had heard of the strategy but had no idea of implementation.

I think that the company found DMAIC as a good general methodology. It was simple and effective and seemed to do the job. The issue is that they had not used a methodology like DMAIC before so they had nothing to compare it with but it seemed to be effective

We did not really apply the full Six Sigma approach on a CTQ issue. What we did is pull the core methodology out of the Six Sigma approach and applied it to TPM. I think it worked quite well but a company who has applied SS before would be good to analyse in its application of TPM

Monitoring costs

Submitted by Thomas on Wed, 12/07/2006 - 5:47pm.

This is a good point Emmanuel. SS had for many years been considered by companies as being a high cost strategy primarily only really applied by large industries who had the funds to support such costs of running projects. Jack Welch of GE highlights may GE based projects totalling some $2 million but creating savings in excess of $12million. Basically put in a lot of cash and you will save even more cash.

SMEs however cannot even consider such costs and it is important that the total project costs are fully calculated and then compared against the actual savings. Full cost calculation however may only be sufficient after maybe six months after the project has been completed.

I have no real stats to show how monitoring costs could exceed project savings but logically they could well do and could therefore be an area for study. If you consider a large company employing maybe 10 SS engineers, 4-5 managers etc it will not take long before your team would cost more than you save. This is why SS teams in companies such as Sony and GE are expected to return $2-3 million in savings every year in order to cover costs.

OEE analysis

Submitted by Juhani Heilala on Thu, 13/07/2006 - 8:33am.

OEE analysis carried out in the case, was it purely manual method, operators filling data collection forms. Was it based on a standard or some other systematic method.
I have had many discussion with production engineer, saying different peoples calculates OEE values differently, human errors and interpretation ? (I a large company having many factories, this makes comparison of factory efficiencies challenging, one solution is automated data collection).I know that there is a lot of consultacy and software companies providing tools for OEE analysis.
In our own work I have been using definitions from SEMI (semiconductor industry), you could read our paper, it is Design Systems. http://conference.iproms.org/life_cycle_and_unit_cost_analysis_for_modular_re_configurable_flexible_light_assembly_systems
Our aim was to predict planned assembly system efficiency using simulation, OEE and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
Could you suggest suitable reading on FMECA, is there publically available FMECA sheets.

Juhani

OEE Analysis

Submitted by Thomas on Thu, 13/07/2006 - 10:06pm.

Juhani

Thanks for your question.

The method of data capture was purely manual and it was obtained by one of the authors of this paper. The reason for doing so and not to rely on operators capturing the data is purely down to what you identify (differences in approach etc).

I will have a look at your paper, it could give us new ideas in this area.

As for FMECA analysis, we have used a range of reliability engineering books and papers (authors I do not have on hand). We produced our own FMECA sheets. We felt that using individual sheets would allow the operators to take the sheets with them when undertaking the maintenance tasks rather than carry around a traditional FMEA spreadsheet with them where much of the sheet was irrelevant to them

An Integrated Approach to TPM and Six Sigma Development in the Castings Industry.

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