Beyond Loss Cost: An AHP Framework for Prioritising Focused Improvement Initiatives in Total Productive Maintenance

Focused Improvement (FI) teams in Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) must decide which loss-reduction initiatives to pursue first, yet TPM prescribes no method for this choice, and plants usually rank initiatives by loss cost. This study develops and tests a multi-criteria framework for this decision. An Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) hierarchy of four criteria and 16 sub-criteria, derived from the JIPM loss structure and the literature, was weighted by 15 division and department heads of an Indonesian pipe manufacturer, 12 of whom then compared five initiatives from the plant’s 2026 improvement portfolio. Consistency, consensus, alternative aggregations, weight sensitivity, critical weights and a bootstrap over experts were analysed. Business impact received the highest weight (0.448), followed by sustainability (0.285), operational urgency (0.177) and implementation feasibility (0.090); customer impact, long-term benefit and quality outweighed cost reduction. The yield-loss initiative ranked first in 99.9% of bootstrap panels, and a quality initiative with the smallest realised saving rose from last to second place, so the AHP ranking agreed only weakly with the monetary ranking (ρ = 0.40). Loss cost should therefore inform, but not decide, the order of FI initiatives. The study extends AHP in TPM from ranking success factors to ranking FI initiatives and shows that managers value customer impact and risk above loss cost.