The impact of Quality Maintenance Pillar of TPM on manufacturing performance

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the contributions of Quality Maintenance (QM) Pillar of TPM approach in improving the product quality in a food industry manufacturing potato chips. QM Pillar is an important initiative of TPM methodology which aims to give customer delight through defect free manufacturing. The effective TPM implementation enhances production efficiency with an ultimate aim of attaining zero breakdowns, zero losses and zero defects. The focus of QM Pillar is on eliminating non-conformances in a systematic manner and maintaining equipment to produce high quality products. The QM pillar activities in the industry remained successful in reducing the customer complaints and regulatory complaints to zero. Also, considerable reduction in number of major defects occurred and leakage problems reduced from 1.20% to 0.27%. The QM pillar targets are achieved successfully by the industry such as sustaining customer complaints at zero, reduce in-process defects by 83% and reduce cost of quality by 46%.