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The equipment reliability plays a critical role in business success because degradation in equipment condition negatively impacts plants’ output. When Toyota Motor Corporation operates overseas plants, equipment reliability management is one of the most important hurdles for global production which has to be overcome. It is important to develop an equipment reliability management program to minimize support from Japan to let overseas plants become self-reliant.This article explains how the Advanced TPS can be applied specifically to the equipment reliability process with equipment owner Total Production Maintenance (TPM). This business process focuses on managing equipment reliability to meet the business goals of Toyota Manufacturing USA.

Conventional precision forming of sheet metal requires the use of mechanical tools. However, during product development, different tools may be required to form various shapes, thus requiring significant tool cost and lead time. If a rapid prototyping process were available such that the required shapes can be formed without the need for hard tools, the potential reduction in product development cost and lead time could be quite significant. Moreover, such a process could be used for very short run production where it would be uneconomical to amortize tooling cost over a small number of manufactured pieces. To explore the potential for flexible forming without tools, various researchers have used laser beams as a heat source to form sheet metals, with a significant measure of success. To investigate the use of a more economical and potentially safer heat source, the authors recently established an experimental system to investigate the feasibility of forming sheet metals using a non-transferred arc plasma as the energy beam and CO2 as the cooling jet. Several samples have been formed using the developed experimental system. Experiments have shown that the forming direction, either toward or away from the plasma arc beam, can be completely controlled to allow the formation of complex shapes. It is believed that this provides the basis for a new rapid prototyping process for the forming of sheet metal components.