Total Productive Maintenance Impact Quantification on Sustainable Manufacturing Performance: A Multi-Plant Longitudinal Big Data Analysis

Nkemakonam Chidiebele Igbokwe¹, Charles Chikwendu Okpala², Charles Onyeka Nwamekwe³

¹ Ass. Professor, Industrial/Production Engineering Department, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.

² Professor, Industrial/Production Engineering Department, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.

³ Lecturer, Industrial/Production Engineering Department, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.  

Abstract

Manufacturing systems face intensifying pressure to decarbonize while they sustain productivity and profitability. Although Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) has been widely adopted to enhance equipment reliability and operational efficiency, its measurable contribution to environmental sustainability remains under-explored in longitudinal, multi-plant settings. This study quantifies the sustainability impact of TPM maturity using five years of panel data from multiple manufacturing plants, through the integration of fixed-effects econometric modeling, causal mediation analysis, and machine learning–based counterfactual estimation. The obtained results indicate that a 0.10 increase in TPM maturity is associated with a 0.61 percentage-point improvement in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), a 0.048 kWh/unit reduction in energy intensity, a 0.031 kg CO₂e/unit decrease in carbon intensity, and a 0.067 percentage-point reduction in material waste. Mediation analysis reveals that over 55% of environmental gains are transmitted through improvements in OEE, which confirm operational reliability as a structural decarbonization mechanism. Counterfactual modeling estimates cumulative avoided impacts of 140,500 MWh of energy consumption, 83,900 tons of CO₂e emissions, and 11,250 tons of material waste over the study period. Financial performance improved concurrently, and support complementarity between environmental and economic objectives. Through the introduction of the Sustainability-Integrated TPM Impact Framework (S-TPMIF), this research bridges operations management, sustainability science, and industrial analytics, and demonstrated that reliability-centered maintenance can serve as a scalable, data-driven pathway towards sustainable manufacturing transformation.     

Keywords: Total productive maintenance, Sustainable manufacturing, Longitudinal panel data, Operational reliability, Energy intensity, Carbon emissions, Eco-efficiency

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