Creating an Improvement Pull

This article continues the theme of the recent webinar on Leading an Improvement Culture Revolution. When developing the content for that I was reminded of an article I wrote way back in 2019 for M&E magazine?TPM's Secret Leadership Primer?which explains the Leadership road map embedded in the Total Productive Maintenance process.?

The article explains how the TPM process systematically engages front line production, maintenance and support personnel with practical daily actions to ratchet up performance.?

Its an approach that develops shop floor insight into the causes of recurring problems and builds the capability to fix those problems for good as part of the daily routine.?

In addition to cost, quality and delivery gains, the TPM leadership process transforms management, engineering and support roles by releasing time spent dealing with the normal daily friction and firefighting. It also secures a higher level of delegation of routine tasks to front line teams.?

The TPM Master plan guides leaders on how to invest the time saved to build a better, more responsive operation. What’s more, these gains are typically achieved at low or in some cases no additional cost with a payback in months if not weeks.?

How TPM Makes Improvement Part of the Routine

The most common reasons for the failure of improvement practices to take hold as part of the routine can be categorised as "gaps in the fabric of management".?TPM was developed to deal with the gaps including:

1. What to do when things go wrong:??A formal process to deal with the underlying causes of failure and systematically try out and learn from new ideas and opportunities for improvement.
2. How to manage change:?That covers processes used to align cross functional priorities and systematically engage all levels of the workforce with introducing new ideas. This includes priming the ideas pump to make people curious about what could be done to improve the current state.
3. How to encourage behaviours?that:?

• Reinforce standards of work and highlight capability gaps
• Make it easy for front line roles to highlight and resolve missing or complex work routines.
• Develop capability, build on new ideas and share lessons learned.?

For those that want to know more about how to make this happen, check out the content of our?TPM Best Practice Leadership Course. The topics within this 3 day workshop can be provided as stand alone training modules to support the development of managers, team leaders and change agents.

Written by Dennis McCarthy