(PD meets TPM)

The IPAV System provides a real-time view of the production line as a whole and continuously calculates Productive Downtime.

Productive Downtime, in the context of coupled manufacturing, is defined as the time available for a production machine operator to stop his machine without affecting the overall performance or efficiency of the production line. See An Overview of the IPAV System for more detail.

Downtime is inevitable. What's not inevitable is that downtime is lost!

The IPAV system allows an operator to indicate to all other machines on the production line how long their machine will be down to resolve an unscheduled stoppage. This we classify as static downtime. In addition, by virtue of accumulators and their capacities, there is dynamic downtime. The combination of these is what we call Productive Downtime.

We prefer to take a positive view on this time, hence the term Productive Downtime.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance program philosophy which integrates equipment maintenance into the manufacturing process. One of the goals of TPM is to keep equipment producing with little or no downtime and to keep unscheduled maintenance to a minimum.

Productive Downtime integrates perfectly into this philosophy by indicating to the operator when time is available during manufacturing, to perform preventative, periodic or corrective maintenance.

Rather than adopting the approach of separating out maintenance and production time, Productive Downtime highlights time during production when it is safe to perform maintenance.

The critical factor in this is that Productive Downtime takes into account a machine's impact on Line Efficiency. Productive Downtime indicates how much time is available before a machine will have an impact on Line Efficiency, thereby allowing an operator to choose how best to use that time.

Productive Downtime facilitates the integration of equipment maintenance into the production process.

There are many other indicators that contribute towards TPM, available from the IPAV system.

These include:

• OEE (including the breakdown of Availability, Performance and Quality) on a real-time and shift basis

• MTBF and MTTR are tracked in real-time, per shift and long-term, since the start of equipment monitoring

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