Strategic Scheduling as a Part of Your Factory’s TPM Strategy

Developed by the Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance in 1971, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) provides manufacturers proactive and preventive techniques for improving equipment reliability.

TPM has eight pillars, creating a holistic framework that involves the entire organization:

1. Focused Improvement: Identify losses in every process and work to eliminate them.
2. Autonomous Maintenance: Identify causes behind losses. Increase employee’s skills so that they can understand, manage, and improve their equipment and processes.
3. Planned Maintenance: Goal is to achieve zero breakdowns at optimum costs through proper training of mechanics and engineers.
4. Education & Training: Support the continuous knowledge improvement of all workers and management.
5. Early Management: Implement new and improved products and processes based on what was learned from the previous four pillars.
6. Quality Management: Goal is to ensure zero defects from being produced in the first place.
7. Administrative/Office TPM: Ensure that all processes support the optimization of manufacturing processes at optimal cost while also increasing employee morale.
8. Safety, Health & Environment: Aim to achieve zero accidents and no pollution.

TPM’s effectiveness relies on the full support of your workforce. This is why manufacturing enterprises should not underestimate the importance of the Education & Training pillar. Read on to learn how strategic, optimized employee scheduling can help enhance and support your training and skills management processes.

The Education & Training Pillar

This framework ensures that your workforce is trained in the skills identified as essential for the successful deployment of TPM in line with the enterprise’s goals and objectives.

The overall methodology is as follows:

• Define the knowledge and skillsets required for completing each job alongside the number of employees required.
• Assess ‘what you have’ against ‘what you need’.
• Develop a training plan (and/or hiring strategy) to bridge the gap.
• Provide continuous skills development for all current and future employees.

Qualification management—including having centralized, easy-to-find access to the certifications and training documentation of all your employees—is a critical foundation to support the Education & Training pillar. If the best, most qualified employees (based on availability, previous hours worked, and what they have been trained to do) are not scheduled to each required position, you are not maximizing their potential.

Instead, you leave the factory vulnerable to human error (e.g., poorly completed jobs, broken equipment) by accidentally scheduling an employee who either does not have the proper training or is exhausted from overwork. You also run the risk of having to retrain employees who have not been able to deploy all their skills, as they are stuck working the same job—a costly effort that could have been avoided.

Qualification and skills management is also an important factor in achieving Enterprise Acceleration, which is defined by aligning your software with your talent to make the entire organization move faster and become more agile. This should be the goal of every manufacturer.

With employee scheduling, there is a balancing act between short-term (e.g., who is best to work job X today/tomorrow) versus long-term (e.g., rotating employees to work all the positions they are qualified for to keep their skillsets across a wide variety fresh) objectives. Indeavor Schedule is built to be a part of your Total Productive Maintenance methodology. Qualification and skills management is embedded at the point of scheduling, and the entire scheduling process is automated. We can help manufacturers obtain the balance between short- and long-term scheduling goals to ultimately avoid the excess costs that come with improperly trained employees.

The Indeavor Solution

We have an established history of helping manufacturers track, manage, and leverage the skills of their entire workforce to drive operational efficiency.

With Indeavor Schedule, you can automatically assign employees based on an integrated skills matrix in minutes to ensure you always have the right person, in the right place, at the right time. With centralized access to all certifications, you can search and identify workers based on specific skills or ‘date last worked’ and be notified when qualifications expire. Organizations can use our system as a Qualification Management System (QMS) if they have nothing in place, or they can integrate their existing QM system.

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Indeavor’s solution offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling and absence management system. By integrating with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems, you can leverage a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data. Relieve your supervisors of manual tasks and the constant mental fatigue brought upon by scheduling changes by automating the entire process, connecting the data to all of your existing corporate systems, and ensuring you always have the right qualified employee in each position.