This article is for maintenance managers, production managers and TPM leads who have launched autonomous maintenance and want it to be more useful than ticked-off checklists.
- Autonomous maintenance relies on operators’ senses and know-how.
- Slow degradation slips between two rounds unnoticed.
- Four production signals show where to look on the next round.
- Every threshold breach becomes a documented work request.
Autonomous maintenance rests on a strong idea: operators know their machine better than anyone. They see it, hear it and touch it all day long. But they still need the right signals to catch what their senses cannot detect.
The first pillar of TPM
In TPM (Total Productive Maintenance): what are we talking about? (in French), Fleur Torlini of Tribofilm presents the eight pillars of TPM and its ambition: “Its goal: to turn maintenance into a collective responsibility.” The first pillar, autonomous maintenance, gives operators responsibility for cleaning, inspection, lubrication and spotting anomalies.
The article is also clear-eyed about the limits: TPM takes time, training, real team commitment and precise indicators. It shows how a CMMS such as MAINTI4 tracks anomalies, generates work requests and keeps the intervention history.
Those precise indicators are exactly the link most often missing on the production side.
What the senses catch, and what they miss
A cleaning, inspection and lubrication round is very good at detecting what can be seen or heard: a leak, an abnormal noise, a loose screw, a damaged guard. That is the core of first-level maintenance, and nothing replaces it.
A slow degradation, however, slips through between two rounds. A machine losing a few strokes per minute, a station that stops a little more often every day, a startup that needs one more adjustment: none of these signals is visible to the naked eye. They show up in production data, over several days.
Four drift signals to put in front of operators
| Signal | What it may indicate | What the operator does |
|---|---|---|
| Rising micro-stops on a station | Guide wear, a fouled sensor, gradual misalignment | Inspect the area and qualify the cause |
| Cycle time getting longer | Loss of power, friction, worn equipment | Report the gap and compare it with the reference rate |
| Repeated stops on the same cause | An underlying problem patched on the surface every time | Open a work request instead of just restarting |
| Difficult restarts after a break or a changeover | Unstable setting, a wear part at end of life | Record the ramp-up time and raise the alert |
None of these signals proves a breakdown is coming. Together, they tell you where to look during the next round, and when not to wait for it.
From drift to work request
Autonomous maintenance gets stronger when the loop is short. The signal appears on the line screen. The operator checks, qualifies and, if the drift is confirmed, opens a work request in the CMMS with the facts: since when, how often, on which station.
The technician receives a documented request, not a “it’s making a weird noise.” The CMMS keeps the history, and production data shows whether the intervention corrected the drift. Maintenance and production finally work from the same reality.
Implementation in five steps
- Choose a critical machine, ideally a bottleneck where every lost minute costs you.
- Continuously measure its stops and speed for two to three weeks, to learn its normal behavior.
- Set two or three simple thresholds with the operators, for example a number of micro-stops per hour or a speed gap, beyond which they act.
- Display these signals at the workstation and build them into the autonomous maintenance round.
- Link every threshold breach to a work request in the CMMS, then check the effect in the data.
In plants equipped with TEEPTRAK, unplanned stops drop by 30% on average. Measurement is installed in about one hour per machine, without touching the PLC.
Further reading
- TPM (Total Productive Maintenance): what are we talking about?, Fleur Torlini, Tribofilm: the eight pillars of TPM and the role of the CMMS.
- TPM and OEE: how Total Productive Maintenance and OEE work together
FAQ
What is autonomous maintenance? It is the first pillar of TPM. Operators take charge of the basic upkeep of their machine: cleaning, inspection, lubrication and spotting anomalies.
What is the difference between autonomous maintenance and preventive maintenance? Autonomous maintenance is carried out by operators every day. Preventive maintenance is scheduled and carried out by the maintenance team at defined intervals.
What data should operators get? Not much, and easy to read: the trend in micro-stops, the speed gap and repeated stops on their station, with thresholds set together with them.
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