Lean TPM

Leading the way to excellence!

Organisations that have achieved World Class Performance follow similar improvement strategies. In some industries improvement strategies help the best performers to sustain profit levels of ten times the industry average. These organisations have been able to combine operational excellence with strategic leadership to develop products and services which provide opportunities for growth and increased value added. These are the components of the improvement route map set out by Nick Rich and Dennis McCarthy in their book Lean TPM, a blueprint for change.

What is Lean TPM?

• "Lean" refers to Lean Thinking. An approach designed to highlight and reduce areas of non value adding activity by stripping out wasted effort and improving flow rates across the supply chain. It provides the foundations for slicker internal processes, reduced cash flow, simpler coordination collaboration with customers and suppliers
• Total Productive Manufacturing (TPM) has a proven track record in improving process reliability, increasing process output and reducing quality defects. As this addresses the root causes of management firefighting it also releases management and specialist resources to focus on the longer term improvement goals.
• The synergy created by combining these 2 proven techniques extends the improvement agenda beyond the traditional top down, shop floor outlook, providing a route map to deliver market leading capability.

The approach also incorporating proven improvement tactics for management planning,logistics, investment in technology, supply chain management and product development. Areas which are often overlooked but are essential to creating the proactive culture which marks out the successful from those merely surviving.

In doing so the Lean TPM provides a route map to links Business and Improvement strategies setting out how to first stabilise and then optimise business operations.

It is a Never Ending Improvement Process

Reducing waste to improve efficiency doesn't happen over night. It takes discipline and focus to get the improvement strategy connected up with the strategy of the business. Unfortunately, many companies end up with pockets of improvement which do not necessarily deliver bottom line benefits. They run out of steam or become disillusioned with the whole idea of continuous improvement.

Nick Rich of Cardiff University Business School explains. "Successful improvement strategies work like peeling an onion, each layer of problems solved reveals another layer of waste which can be removed to the benefit of the business."

Dennis continues, "It is possible to achieve short term gains by reducing head count but the best you can hope for with this approach is that the competition do not get any stronger. Future improvement will be limited by resources. Furthermore, many manufacturing plants are constrained by labour availability not equipment bottlenecks. The most effective levers to increase productivity are raising order volumes and targeted investment. Topics which are often missing from improvement strategies."

Improvement strategies increase capacity. If you can sell the increased capacity, the benefit to the bottom line is around five times that achieved by reducing head count. Some managers complain that they are in a market with no potential for growth. If this is the case, the future of the company is assured in that it will either fail or be acquired by a competitor. Even where the plant is one of a number in the company, management cannot afford to turn down the potential productivity gains provided through growth.

Nick and Dennis are both passionate about the importance of leadership. This comes over in the book in a very practical way using examples from their extensive experience of helping organisations and managers to deliver real improvements. It is central to the task of reducing management firefighting to releases specialist and management resource from day to day problem solving to optimise the business success model.

Lean TPM is available from the Elsevier Publishing web site. Check out the Lean TPM training courses. Participants to the Lean TPM workshop receive a free signed copy of the book.

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