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 occurs. Only when the downtime is measured carefully and thoughtfully can an early start toward minimizing it be taken. The typical method of obtaining data, which includes operators manually recording downtime on log sheets, usually misses downtime incidents. Therefore, implementing a comprehensive machine maintenance system software that offers a real-time view of the shop floor will yield significant 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 below suggestions for reducing manufacturing downtime :

Regularly train workers on safety to reduce the risk of accidents caused by mistakes.
Review production schedules to find places where work is slowed down and make them better.
Make a reliable plan to keep equipment in good condition before it breaks down.
Set a schedule for checking important equipment regularly.
Keep track of how long equipment lasts to know when it's time to get new ones.
Watch how well equipment works and quickly notice if something isn't right.
Make sure factories are well-kept to prevent anything from affecting equipment performance.
Always look at how things are done in the factory to find ways to do them better.

How to address the issue?

Figuring out how to eliminate downtime, the hidden drain on manufacturing profits, is at the forefront of our minds. But fear not! Our Smart Factory solutions are equipped with the necessary tools to conquer this profit-devouring challenge. Let's now explore how our smart factory can assist you in this endeavor.

Pre-determine downtime reasons

Our Cloud Smart Factory solutions offer invaluable support to manufacturers. They let you track why downtime happens and give you all the data from when production starts to when it ends. With our solution, you can predict why your machines might stop working and make decisions fast.

Machine Maintenance

Operators have the ability to easily submit maintenance requests directly from their user interface. They can report any issues with machines, such as malfunctions or performance problems, and provide detailed descriptions of what maintenance is needed and which machine is involved. Additionally, they can improve maintenance strategies by analyzing equipment reliability and maintenance operations, using metrics like MTTR and MTBF to minimize downtime and enhance reliability.

Planning ahead for machine care

You can also plan and carry out regular maintenance tasks on your production machines to keep them running smoothly. Our solution helps supervisors spot early signs of wear or potential problems, so they can schedule maintenance before anything goes wrong. This proactive approach helps prevent unexpected breakdowns and keeps production on track. Additionally, supervisors can set up alerts in advance to stay ahead of any issues and adjust their plans accordingly.

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 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.

Our cloud-based smart factory tools assists in analyzing data, identifying reasons for downtime beforehand, and figuring out how to utilize this information to enhance predictive maintenance.

The metric that does not correlate with machine data will not provide you with 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.

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