Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Lean Maintenance -- What's the Difference?

“What is the difference between Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Lean Maintenance?”

That's the question I just posed to Torsten Dederichs, who just published a new book entitled Lean Maintenance: A Practical, Step-By-Step Guide for Increasing Efficiency with Javier Girón Blanco. Considering the amount of money industrial companies spend maintaining their plants and  maintenancing their equipment, I figured it'd be best to include his entire answer here:

What is the difference between onions and apples? Onions are vegetables and apples are fruits.

The first principle of TPM is that the operator is the first line of defense against unplanned downtime. Because operators know their equipment best, they can identify problems long before they get critical. This approach is  a very valuable approach for increasing reliability and reducing  wasted time and repairs.

But what happens when the operators cannot solve the issue themselves? What if the repair needs skilled crafts or engineers? The operator raises a maintenance notification, which launches the maintenance process. And in this same second the operator leaves the TPM world and hands over his engine to our “Lean Maintenance” approach.

Maintenance technicians are the "go-to folks" when machines break down. They are modern-day heroes who can fix anything at anytime. The role of the “hero” becomes evident when maintenance starts to work in a predominantly reactive mode, fire-fighting its way through the day. At this point,  employees begin to view maintenance as a necessary evil because it is basically a cost center that requires management attention as well as capital (spare parts inventory) and personnel. This sentiment is exacerbated when maintenance is performed “at all costs” -- work orders take more time, money and effort to get done, budgets are exceeded, and an unhealthy relationship develops between maintenance and production. At this point, upper management starts to consider ways to get costs under control: top-down cost reductions (meaning that less maintenance gets done, with the corresponding availability risk) and partial or total outsourcing. These measures can provide a quick fix but will not resolve the firefighting nor fix the broken relationship between maintenance and production. This situation can lead to frustration, as things go back to where they were before. To break this vicious circle we propose a different approach.

Maintenance can be a source of profitability by ensuring high availability. As mentioned previously, companies with an efficient and effective maintenance function have a clear competitive advantage. A Lean maintenance function ensures that all resources are dedicated to value-adding activities, taking out the process “waste,” and being able to do more with the current resources.

To achieve Lean maintenance, many elements must be in place: the interfaces between production and maintenance along the full maintenance process must be smooth and maintenance work must be properly selected, prioritized, planned, scheduled and carried out. Everyone involved in the process should know how he or she can contribute to this goal.

The description of the ideal maintenance process and the method for achieving it is the focus of Lean Maintenance: A Practical, Step-By-Step Guide for Increasing Efficiency.


What do you consider the differences between TPM and Lean maintenance? Have you practiced Lean maintenance in your company?