TPM: The Invisible Cost of Conflict Between Production and Maintenance

Failure never happens by chance. It arrives after weeks of ignored signals, of tickets not opened, of “we can't stop now.” It arrives when the pressure to produce has won, for the umpteenth time, over the need to maintain the equipment. And when it arrives, it costs double — in time, in materials, in tensions between departments.

This is the conflict you don't find in reports: not a personal rivalry, but a structural trap in which two functions pursue different goals with the same facilities. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) it was born precisely to dismantle this trap — not with good intentions, but with shared rules, roles, and standards that are integrated into the daily production routine, without blocking the factory.

How conflict arises: a structural, not personal, problem

Imagine a production line with pneumatic systems. Small air leaks, imperfect seals, irregularities in actuators: nothing that immediately stops the machine, but progressive signs of degradation that reduce performance and pave the way for failure.

Those who produce think in terms of immediate continuity: every stop risks jeopardizing the day's targets. Those who maintain think in terms of long-term reliability: if weak signals are not addressed, failure is inevitable. Neither is wrong. The problem is that the system has never clearly defined who should do what., when, and with what standards — and so both end up working reactively, each on their own.

In productive contexts where facilities are the core of the process, these tensions arise structurally from non-unique priorities in the management of technical-productive assetsprevailing functional objectives over plant objectives, slow escalation, delayed decisions, focus on costs rather than productivity. The practical result is that productive maintenance remains an aspiration, and the role of the department maintainer as a stable guarantor of efficiency fails to emerge.

The conflict between production and maintenance arises when both functions share the same objective but do not share the same operational responsibilities.

Who Should Lead Change: The Indispensable Role of Management

Before discussing tools and workflows, it's worth being direct about one point that determines the success or failure of any TPM path: Change cannot be driven from below.

TPM almost always fails for the same reason: it's perceived as a technical maintenance project and delegated to operational levels without real managerial oversight. However, redesigning the boundaries between production and maintenance, building shared standards, and sustaining operational discipline over time requires authority and vision that only plant leadership can provide.

The Plant Manager He is the key figure: he is the only one with authority over both departments and can ensure that the new organizational pact is respected even when daily pressures push towards old habits. The Maintenance Manager must be willing to transform their role: from a “firefighter” putting out emergencies to a designer and manager of a preventive system. A change in professional identity that requires both expanded skills and a different relationship with production. Those who deal with People development and training, finally, it plays a critical role: TPM only works if operators have the skills to perform autonomous maintenance tasks and the motivation to do them continuously. Training people doesn't mean teaching them to fill out a time card: it means building an understanding of why that daily discipline protects the machine, the process, and their jobs.

The TPM does not start from a plant stop: it starts from a managerial decision.

The big innovation of the TPM: overcoming the “I produce, you repair” logic”

The TPM arises from a clear realization: The clear separation between those who produce and those who maintain the systems is the main cause of inefficiency. His innovation was not technical, but organizational: to introduce the distinction between Autonomous Maintenance (AM) e Professional Maintenance (PM), and make it operational through explicit standards, flows, and responsibilities.

Specifically, it means transferring to production operators some basic maintenance functionscleaning, inspection, lubrication, anomaly detection, first response for simple problems. The operator is not asked to become a maintenance worker.He is asked to know his car well enough to recognize signs of degradation before they become a breakdown.

Professional maintenance, freed from the constant emergency, retains specialized activities, root cause analysis, preventive planning, and the development of technical standards.

It's worth correcting a common misconception right away: Maintenance does not necessarily require stopping the machine. Visual inspections, lubrication, tightening of accessible components, parameter checks, and seal condition checks are all tasks that can be performed while the line is in production. TPM systematizes these maintenance moments into daily operational routines, integrating them into normal work instead of concentrating them into extraordinary downtime. The goal is not production control maintenance, but production with maintenance — each in their own role, on the same system, with the same standards.

TPM vs. Traditional Maintenance: Why It's Not the Same

One of the most common resistances companies encounter is this: “But we already do the maintenance.” It's an understandable answer, but it hides an important confusion. The TPM it's not simply about doing more maintenance or doing it better: it is a radically different organizational model from the traditional one, And the difference is not one of degree but of nature.

In traditional maintenance, the typical cycle is: the machine breaks down, production calls, maintenance intervenes, and the line restarts. When things go well, there's also scheduled preventive maintenance—but it's often based on fixed calendars, not the actual condition of the equipment, and managed entirely by the maintenance department without operator involvement. The result is a system that operates in silos: production produces, maintenance repairs, and efficiency losses remain invisible because no one systematically measures them.

The TPM structurally changes three things.

Make leaks visible before they become failures. The measurement of’OEE and downtime is the starting point for understanding where value is truly lost. Analysis of real TPM projects systematically reveals that about a third of breakdowns are directly attributable to a lack of maintained basic conditions—dirt, unreported leaks, unmonitored worn components. Another third can be addressed through more mature autonomous maintenance. Essentially, more than half of unplanned downtime stems from the absence of a structured system for daily equipment care, not from unpredictable technical failures.

It distributes the responsibility for facility maintenance. Traditional maintenance concentrates all responsibility in a single function. TPM distributes it: operators take care of the basic condition of their machines, and professional maintenance focuses on specialized interventions and planning. Signs of degradation are thus intercepted earlier by the people closest to the machine.

Replaces reactive logic with proactive and planned logic. The TPM explicitly distinguishes between planned maintenance — preventive, predictive, time-based, condition-based — and unplanned maintenance, i.e., breakdowns that unexpectedly interrupt production. The goal is to shift maintenance work as much as possible into the “planned” column, reducing unpredictability and the costs of emergencies.

How it works operationally: workflow and tools

redrawing of responsibilities results in a Clear and traceable workflow. Taking the management of pneumatic systems as an example—among the most frequent cases of micro-stops and progressive degradation—the model works like this:

1. The operator checks the holdings of the organs that use compressed air on the machine, even during ongoing production
2. Check the presence of any losses or malfunctions according to defined standards
3. If he can solve it, Intervenes directly (self-maintenance) without having to involve maintenance
4. If you can't solve it, a formal request is opened — the TPM tag — with priority, description, and expected completion date
5. The maintenance worker takes charge of the specialized intervention, plans the most opportune window—often without stopping the line—closes the tag, and verifies the outcome
6. The Scheduled maintenance collects reports, oversees line inspections, and schedules preventive maintenance for the compressed air distribution.

The TPM ticket management board makes this process visual and shared: reporting, ownership, planning, verification. No more informal verbal requests, no more sudden urgencies. Conflict is reduced when the system is transparent.

The Responsibility Matrix: Who Does What in TPM

To eliminate organizational gray areas, the TPM precisely defines who is Manager, who Approver (A), who Consulted (C) and who Informed for each activity category:

R = Responsible, A = Accountable, C = Consulted, I = Informed

This clarity is the true antidote to conflict: no gray areas, no ambiguity about who has to do what.

A real-world case: from perennial emergency to operational governance

In an average manufacturing company, the critical point was the management of pneumatic systems across multiple lines. Issues with seals and air leaks didn't immediately stop the machine but progressively degraded its performance. Production tended to keep the line running as much as possible; maintenance was involved late, often for emergencies, when the failure was already confirmed.

With the TPM, the company stopped treating the problem as technical and addressed it as a topic of operational governance. The starting point was to measure actual losses through OEE and downtime stratification—because you can't improve what you can't see. Then, a structured path was initiated on a pilot line: restoring basic conditions, introducing autonomous maintenance, implementing the TPM tag system, and progressively building planned maintenance.

A key aspect: maintenance has not required production downtime. Many first-level checks and interventions have been integrated into operators' routines during their normal shifts; specialized tasks have been scheduled in natural breaks between shifts or during production changeovers. By introducing small moments of planned care, the company has drastically reduced unexpected interruptions—the costly and disruptive kind.

The benefits manifested in successive waves. In the first few weeks, improvements in order, baseline conditions, and operational discipline emerged: fewer tensions between departments, more structured reporting, clearer work areas. In the following months, the results became measurable: reduction in micro-anomalies, increased process reliability, fewer unnecessary escalations. In the final consolidation, on the monitored lines, the reduction in unscheduled machine downtime was between 20% and 24%, with an increase in output and savings in maintenance capacity quantified in FTE and direct economic value.

How to implement TPM: where to start

The TPM is a progressive path, structured in phases and steps of increasing maturity. It starts with three concrete and sequential actions: measure losses (OEE and downtime), start autonomous maintenance involving operators in the care of basic conditions, build a planned maintenance program in place of the “only intervene when it breaks” logic.

It's rarely worth it to start with the entire facility. The effective model is to choose a pilot line, measure major losses, restore baseline conditions with visual management, and have production and maintenance work together on concrete and visible problems. Rollout to other areas occurs later, when the method is consolidated and results are demonstrable internally.

The timelines follow a wave-like logic: the first signs of order and operational discipline emerge in the initial weeks on the pilot area. Measurable results regarding downtime and micro-anomalies appear within the first few months. Structural results on OEE and reliability require a 6-12 month horizon. Stable cultural transformation – that which makes TPM self-sustaining without depending on external push – typically consolidates within 12-24 months.

The TPM System: Pillars in Summary

The redesign of roles is supported by a system of complementary pillars: Autonomous Maintenance (operator ownership of the machine), Planned Maintenance (replacement of reactive logic with preventive and predictive activities), Training & Education operational skills to support the system, Specific Improvement – Kaizen cross-functional teams attacking chronic losses with data, Quality Maintenance (process conditions management) and Safety, Health & Environment Integrating security into daily plant maintenance.

The TPM encompasses all resources related to manufacturing: By definition, it is a cross-functional approach. The production/maintenance conflict is resolved when both functions work on the same standards, measure the same indicators, and share the same objectives.

Do you want to see the TPM in action?

Understanding TPM is the first step. Knowing how to apply it is what really changes the results.

Inside the Lean Factory School® at Bonfiglioli Consulting, Understanding the TPM method translates into a concrete training experience, because only through the application of the concepts addressed is it possible to verify the real understanding of what has been studied.

The training days feature an alternation between brief theoretical moments and long practical sessions on real, functioning plants and lines. After an initial necessary familiarization with the machine for the course, each participant is assigned a specific role, and the entire team is free to experiment and intervene in their areas of expertise.
All drills are filmed and subsequently transcribed to highlight critical points and good practices.

In the module OEE, we act on the machine's parameters with the goal of measuring production performance, identifying waste, and understanding areas for improvement.

During the module Self-Maintenance, The machine's setup is appropriately modified to recreate (controlled) conditions of dirtiness, faults, and production defects, in order to expose operational shortcomings dictated by the lack of maintenance standards.

Finally, the module SMED highlights the importance of creating efficient, fast, and, above all, shared procedures for crucial format changeover moments, first showing the confusion that arises without format changeover planning and then the concrete benefits generated by a collaborative study of the process.

Bonfiglioli Consulting designed the course Lean & TPM Tools to bring you from theoretical understanding to practical mastery of the tools, within the Lean Factory School® — an environment that simulates real production contexts for hands-on experimentation with collaboration between production and maintenance: autonomous maintenance, TPM tag management, loss measurement, and intervention planning.

Discover the Lean & TPM Tools course and contact us for more information →