What is downtime?
Using a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) as an machine downtime tracker enables efficient monitoring and analysis of equipment failures, helping organizations identify trends, optimize maintenance schedules, and minimize operational disruptions.
At eMaint, we define downtime as any time a machine or piece of equipment is out of service and unavailable for use. All assets should be serviced periodically to maintain asset health and longevity, but unplanned downtime can be extremely costly. Equipment downtime tracking is one KPI that can help businesses focus their efforts to ultimately reduce unplanned downtime.
Downtime can divided into two broad categories:
- Tangible costs, which are relatively easy to quantify. They include lost capacity, lost production, direct labor and inventory product.
- Intangible costs, which are difficult to put a dollar figure on, but may be even more significant than tangible costs. These include responsiveness, stress and important aspects of business such as innovation.
The true downtime cost includes a variety of wasted business support costs and lost business opportunity costs. In fact, almost every factory loses at least 5% of its productive capacity from downtime, and many lose up to 20%. The cost of downtime varies by facility and industry. It can have an especially huge impact on manufacturing companies. In the automotive industry, downtime can cost up to $50,000 per minute. That’s $3 million per hour.
How to avoid unplanned downtime
As a CMMS software, one of eMaint’s key features is its ability to set up scheduled maintenance for your most valuable assets. This proactive approach helps ensure that sure your assets are being well maintained to reduce the risk of unexpected failures.
For example, an eMaint user may set up a monthly inspection on a number of assets. With this monthly inspection, a technician is sent a work order for the scheduled maintenance. During this inspection, the technician may identify and resolve a critical machine issue that could have caused unplanned downtime, saving on unplanned maintenance costs.
Reducing downtime can be accomplished through preventive and predictive maintenance programs. A CMMS solution such as eMaint can help automate key metrics from engineering, production, inventory control, and maintenance to CMMS reports and KPI dashboards. Dashboards give teams and a company’s leadership real-time insight into:
- Downtime by production line
- Work order aging
- Work order throughput
- Open work orders by type
How to measure downtime
Equipment downtime tracking can help reveal recurring failure conditions and process inefficiencies. The most frequently used tracking approach is to calculate from the time the work order for the asset is created to the time the work order is marked completed and closed. This calculation is made by workflow and can then be populated on each work order record once the work order is closed.
Work with an eMaint professional to get started with tracking and recording downtime in a way that is best for you. Together, we can use reports and dashboards to track downtime by asset, shift, month, and other criteria to best gauge your assets’ health. Based on this information, you can see where your preventive maintenance needs are to maximize your productivity and success.