Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)-An Approach for Indian Smes to Improve Manufacturing Performance

Abstract

Competition among various Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in India is continuously increasing day-by-day to satisfy their customers because the needs of the customer are also increasing now-a-days. To satisfy these customer needs, these competitive firms continually increase their productivity, performance & quality standards by adopting various improvement techniques such as total productive maintenance (TPM), total quality management (TQM), justin-time (JIT), Six Sigma and so on. Amongst the various approaches, TPM is only the significant approach that impact directly or indirectly on manufacturing performance and continuous improvement of these firms. In this paper, the authors have evaluated the status and need of TPM for the improvement of manufacturing performance (MP) through questionnaires. The authors have prepared a questionnaire to study the level of TPM practices in Indian SMEs and evaluate the status of these Indian SMEs. SPSS software is used to perform the required statistical analysis of the data collected through surveys. SPSS software is used to find the Cronbach alpha for the validation of collecting data and also find a correlation coefficient between input and output parameters. This paper also systematically categorized the understanding and interest of the implementation of TPM strategies in Indian SMEs on the basis of scores given by respondents through a questionnaire. This research would provide new data and findings on the TPM implementation in Indian SMEs that could be used for future study towards manufacturing performance improvement. The objective of this study is to identify the critical success factors of TPM strategies in Indian SMEs in order to improve manufacturing performance.