will be broken through. A main consequence is that
the maintenance department is not overloaded with reactive activities but can carry out PM tasks and will have
more time to cooperate with other departments to design machines for better maintenance and maintenancefree
machines. Although the maintenance tasks transferred to operators should be easy, there will be still a lack
of knowledge concerning the know how to fulfill these tasks. So the machine operators must be trained. The
training must be carried out by the maintenance department to guarantee a sufficient maintenance level of the
machine operators. It has to be considered that operator’s learning is time consuming, thus the existing lack of
knowledge will be reduced gradually and not immediately. But, in the long run, the learning process leads to
the fact that operators achieve a higher understanding of the functioning of their machines. Accordingly, they
can give insights about their day to day work for the improvement of maintenance activities, i.e. contributing
to a better design for maintainability. As the maintenance department’s efforts for accomplishing maintenance
tasks decreases, more simple maintenance tasks can be assigned to machine operators and as a result machine
operators will become more and more familiar with their machines. This, in turn, will suggest more and more
ideas for improving their machines’ maintainability which as a result tend to reduce equipment defects, and
the cycle goes on. Fig. 9 shows the complete flow diagram for Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) in which
relationships of throughput pressure, operators’ training, machine reliability, and process quality have be been
shown as a whole.