Impact of Downtime in Manufacturing

In any business and production process, the saying “Time is Money” holds true. Every second that a machine is running earns money in the manufacturing industry. The longer it takes to develop raw materials into finished goods, the more money it costs to get them out. What will happen if your machines are left idle for an extended period of time? There is a possibility that revenue will be lost. Downtime refers to the duration of an unplanned or unexpected outage. The Ignition OEE Downtime Module enables manufacturers to identify problem areas in a production line or across an entire business. This extensive understanding into the topic of downtime, its impact on the production process, and ways to minimise it.

Actual Cost of Manufacturing Downtime

Downtime is something that no industry likes to deal with. Every industry in the world is living in a nightmare. According to one estimate, practically every industry loses 5 to 20% of its production due to downtime, with the expenses being outrageous. Machine failures can bring production to a halt and cost a company millions of dollars. This surprising statistic demonstrates the high cost of downtime. As a result, every industrial industry must consider the financial cost of downtime. Unplanned outages can cost a lot of money and have a major impact on the industry’s bottom line. It is not an option to ignore the expense of downtime, and limiting downtime is critical to a company’s bottom line. To meet financial objectives and maintain a healthy bottom line, it’s important to understand the true cost of downtime and how to minimize it.

Why do Machines Sit idle?

Tool failures, machine faults, process failures, unplanned stoppage, and other factors can all contribute to downtime. While most people associate downtime with breakdowns, it is actually an unplanned event that has a significant impact on your production process. Excessive changeovers, a lack of operators, and unplanned machine repairs are all examples of unplanned downtime. To deal with it, you must first understand each downtime and how it affects your industry’s revenue.

How to Calculate Downtime for Equipment:

Because this term can refer to any event that causes a halt in manufacturing, it’s critical for a company to first determine what kind of downtime they want to calculate. Assume a factory is experiencing some issues with machines failing. They’ve determined that this is the majority of their downtime, making it the most important type of downtime to track. One method for calculating the cost of equipment downtime is to consider the revenue lost during downtime periods. We can do this by comparing the number of products produced in a given time period (per hour) to the amount of money made from each product. Then we compare these figures to the amount of downtime that has occurred.

According to this equation, if we produce 20 units per hour and profit $100.00 per unit, each hour is worth $1000. If we have 4 hours of downtime, we have lost $4,000.00 in just those 4 hours. Consider how much revenue can be lost if the downtime is longer or the product is more profitable. It’s easy to see why this is so critical to track down and fix as soon as possible.

Tracking Manufacturing Downtime

You can prevent and control excessive loss by tracking how, when, and where downtime happens. Only when downtime is measured carefully and thoughtfully can an early start toward minimising it be taken. The typical method of obtaining data, which includes operators manually recording downtime on log sheets, usually misses downtime incidents. As a result, adopting comprehensive monitoring software that provides a real-time view of the shop floor will provide considerable data on downtime situations. Measuring manufacturing OEE, will give a clear view of your production line and help you detect inefficiencies, determine bottlenecks, maintenance concerns, and other downtime-causing events. Recording downtime and determining the cause will drastically decrease production issues and increase the rate of production. Reducing the amount of time that people or machines sit idle will improve the bottom line of the company. Take a look at the suggestions below for reducing manufacturing downtime.

Regularly provide safety training to limit the risk of dangerous user errors.
Make a dependable preventive maintenance schedule.
Establish a routine for inspecting critical equipment.
Keep track of equipment lifespan to determine when it’s time to upgrade.

Analysing the data

The availability of a system concerns unplanned downtime and breakdown losses. As a result, evaluating OEE is a critical factor in eliminating production losses and gaining a better understanding of production. However, simply monitoring OEE and gathering statistics would not help you increase your output. It is critical to develop a strategic enrolling plan based on the acquired data in order to reduce downtime. A perfect OEE tool will help you in analysing the data, determining the cause of downtime, and determining how the information acquired can be used to improve predictive maintenance.

The metric that does not correlate with machine data will not provide you an accurate view of your production loss. The real-time data view of what’s happening on the manufacturing line will give the downtime events in context. As a result, this will allow manufacturers to move away from production difficulties and toward a more efficient manufacturing process.

We will be happy to discuss about your requirements at your shop floor to help you reduce downtime & improve your productivity.