Status and trends in the development of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) - a review of international articles.

Corporate continuous innovation efforts are often guided by (more or less) customized standard management concepts such as "TQM", "BPR" or "Lean". The focus of this article, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), is a contemporary example of such a concept. Although the concept first appeared more than 30 years ago in Japan, it has only recently found it's way to the wider population of companies across Europe, America and Asia, especially within the assembly and process industry area. TPM includes key aspects from team development and continuous improvement aimed at obtaining preventive maintenance and high efficiency of the production facilities. However, during the last ten years, the concepthas been developed into a company wide (management)concept, also compromising efficiency in the administrative part of a company, safety and environmental aspects, as well as product quality. Based on extensive reviews of international research articles this article focuses on TPM as a conceptin order to detect the development process and current status of the concept. The first part is an introduction where TPM is compared with "TQM", "BPR" and Lean Manufacturing. The second part describes the definition and principles of the TPM concept. In the third part findings are illustrated in graphs and discussed. In the last part a conclusion is summed up and some indication for further research is presented.