AN ASSESSMENT OF TOTAL PRODUCTIVE MAINTENANCE AND BEST PRACTICES THAT CONTRIBUTES TO A SUCCESSFUL PROGRAM: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY

Manufacturing sector's performance towards the South African economy has reduced significantly over the last decade. Diverse manufacturing programs from World Class Manufacturing, Lean Manufacturing and Total Productive Maintenance are the long term solution for organization to be cost effective and survive in the market place. The research study evaluates contributing factors towards successful Total Productive Maintenance implementation together with program obstacles. The study aims to investigate and analyze the skills and the best practices that support success of Total Productive Maintenance. The research advances to comparison between two factories in South Africa and Turkey that has fully implemented Total Productive Maintenance. The analysis indicates that South Africa performed the lowest in all eight Total Productive Maintenance standards compared to other facilities. The key findings are Turkey invests time training employees and 50% of production lines are on autonomous maintenance step 3 while South Africa has not achieved even one line on autonomous maintenance step 3. The other finding indicates that in 2019 South Africa has an annual average of 68% for maintenance adherence compared to Turkey with an average of 88%. The results and analysis demonstrate that training, maintenance adherence and basic maintenance skills enables successful TPM implementation.