he application of motor systems maintenance and management programs have the potential impact of saving industry an initial $26.5 Billion in electrical energy costs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by over 3,000 Mega-Tons per year.  The individual impact on production availability is also significant, by reducing troubleshooting and evaluation time by over 50%, motor repair by over 30% and general motor-system related labor by up to 50%, following the application and sustainment of the program.  In this article, we are going to cover three opportunities obtained through the application of the Electrical Motor Diagnostic component of an overall program.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance program which involves a newly defined concept for maintaining plants and equipment. This paper will define TPM history, benefits, strengths as a maintenance philosophy, its implementation approach, difficulties in its implementation and cost of implementing TPM. TPM is to Maintenance as Total Quality is to Production The goal of the TPM program is to markedly increase production while, at the same time, increasing employee morale and job satisfaction.

In nearly all of the 250 or so equipment intensive plants and facilities I have visited, taught at, and worked in over the past 30 years, I have observed the relationships between the skills of employees and the reliability of the equipment. These observations may provide helpful insights for plant and facility managers who are troubled with unreliable equipment and high maintenance costs. Here are a few:

It’s happened … the announcement that a major portion of your facility is being closed for the foreseeable future. What do you do next?

There’s lots more than purchase price to consider when replacing pump parts. Can your operations afford the risk of simply buying on the cheap?

Thinking back about the initial resistance to TPM, Don Russell laughs and says, “At first a lot of folks here defined TPM as ‘Totally Painted Machines’. Now I can say we all define TPM as ‘Taking Pride in our Machines’.”

After a couple of decades of testing, Lean business practices are now widely accepted as a major contributor to extraordinary customer service and profitable operations. But with this acceptance has come a new leveling of the playing field in many industries. The preemptive competitive advantages enjoyed by early Lean adopters have dissipated as more and more companies are “converted” to techniques that reduce waste and slash lead times. We have also come to the realization that only the most effective operations can position a company to compete with competitors who source off shore to suppliers in low cost labor markets.