Page 86 - Facility Management (All Chapter)

TOTAL PRODUCTIVE MAINTENANCE

7.6 TPM ORGANIZATION

One of the most common questions is: “how the organisation should be
structured?” There are several philosophies that are currently being used, so
each must be analysed for the application to a company. In many cases, a
combination of various aspects of the different philosophies may be used.

One school of thought is to have the maintenance personnel assigned directly
to the line or operations personnel. This can work; however, the maintenance
organisation will still have to exist with a core of skilled personnel with a
technical focus. The organisational structure may be viewed as in Figure 7.5.
This structure allows the maintenance department to have some personnel for
more technical assignments, but keeps the primary maintenance personnel on
the maintenance department to have some personnel on the team where they
can be focused. This structure is really just a slight modification of the common
area maintenance organisation pictured in Figure 7.6. The major point is to
keep the maintenance personnel focused on the maintenance responsibilities.
If they are viewed as just another team member and used as another operator,
the ultimate goal of improving the equipment utilization will not be achieved. A
second danger in this arrangement is that some operations managers have
used it as a method of getting control of the maintenance personnel. If this
happens, some short term benefits appear to be gained; but in the long term,
the organisation suffers, since the focus of maintenance the equipment is lost.

BPLK 86 DMQ 40392