About
A teacher of TPM, on the shop floor since 1996
Dr. Uttam Kumar Chatterjee has spent nearly three decades advancing Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) — the discipline of unleashing the creativity of people and the full potential of equipment to reach zero breakdowns, zero defects and zero accidents.
A JIPM-certified TPM Instructor since 1997, he introduced TPM across some 40 Hindustan Lever / Unilever factories in Asia as Head of Manufacturing Excellence, and helped sites in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and beyond earn the coveted JIPM TPM Excellence Award — with returns of 8–10× on their TPM investment. As a member of Unilever's global Manufacturing Excellence team, he helped standardise TPM across more than 250 factories worldwide.
His research into how TPM scales across an entire enterprise produced, in 2008, the world's first PhD in TPM, from IIT Kharagpur — where he later served as an Adjunct Professor teaching manufacturing strategy, supply chain and operational excellence. He was the only non-Japanese speaker invited by JIPM's directors to present TPM in Japan, a founder board member of the TPM Club of India, and a senior advisor to the CII.
Since 2011 he has served as a Top-Management Advisor & Consultant with JMAC (Japan), and in 2015 founded TPM Consulting Company — through which he supports manufacturers across India, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, from automotive suppliers and food companies to chemical, steel and cement plants.
