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  Want to Embrace the Smart Factory Revolution? Start With Equipment Downtime Tracking

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Industry 4.0. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The smart factory. Call the concept whatever you want, the core goal remains the same. You're talking about an era when manufacturing organizations embrace big data and automation to such a degree that improvements in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and flexibility are a forgone conclusion. According to one recent study , the global smart factory market size is anticipated to hit an enormous $321 billion by as soon as 2032. The last few years have taught us that manufacturers need to better prepare themselves for some of life's bigger challenges and an investment in digital transformation is going to be a big part of how they do it. Of course, that demands the question - just how big does that investment have to be? Do you have to tear down your current factory and build an entirely new one from the ground up to take advantage of all the benefits that a smart factory can bring with it? Not exactly. In fact, you may already be
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The Predictive Maintenance Market is Growing Again in 2024 and We Have Machine Downtime Tracking to

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It doesn't matter what type of manufacturing you're talking about - we all know the pain that comes with having an essential machine suddenly fail without a clear reason why. One minute, your people and your assembly lines are moving exactly as they should be. The next minute, everything comes to a screeching halt and every second that ticks by has a dollar value attached to it. Tracking machine downtime doesn't just alert you to these issues quickly so you can do something about them. It also helps prevent them from happening again in the future. In fact, this has become so popular (and ubiquitous) over the years that it's contributing to major growth in the larger predictive maintenance market around the world. The Power of Predictive Maintenance: An Overview According to one recent study , the global predictive maintenance market grew to an enormous $5.5 billion inv alue in 2022. That's a leap of about 11% from just one year prior. More impressively, that g
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Manufacturing is Expensive. Tracking Machine Downtime Can Help

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  It doesn't matter what sector of the industry you're actually operating in, there's one idea that everyone can agree on: manufacturing is expensive . From the cost of specialized equipment to the salaries of the highly trained people that need to operate it. Even just keeping the lights on can be an enormous expense. In an environment where literally every minute has a dollar value attached to it, anything you can do to help ease a little bit of that burden is a step worth taking. That's a big part of what machine downtime tracking can help you do - just not exclusively in the one way that term implies. Spending Money in All the Right Places For starters, yes - any time a piece of equipment on a manufacturing line isn't running, it costs money. Parts aren't being produced. Someone needs to be paid to fix it. That person will probably need to order parts, and so on and so forth. The thing is, that employee is being paid whether they're fixing a ma
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Getting to the Root Cause of Equipment Outages With Machine Downtime Tracking

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  According to one recent study , across the entire manufacturing industry the average cost of downtime is roughly $260,000 per hour. Obviously, smaller organizations will experience fewer losses, but when you look at a figure like that relative to the size of your operations it's still a major challenge that must be addressed. The issue that some people run into with downtime is that they take the event itself far too literally. A machine goes offline, typically in an unplanned capacity - "that's bad." Then, they're able to perform maintenance to get the equipment back up and running again - "that's good." Sometimes, analysis of what is really happening doesn't extend much beyond those core concepts. Shining a New Light on Downtime But when you drill down a bit further, you begin to realize that one of the biggest contributing factors to unplanned downtime incidents is actually inefficient maintenance . This is especially true of manufact
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Reducing Machine Downtime is All About Providing Support in More Ways Than One 

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In most cases, the reason why businesses start tracking machine downtime is simple: they're trying to reduce the impact of what is currently a time-consuming, frustrating, and (most importantly) expensive problem as much as possible. But successful equipment downtime tracking isn't about merely learning how often a problem occurs so you can react to it quickly. It's understanding why that problem occurs so you can take proactive steps to avoid it whenever you can. Indeed, it is that ability to turn insight into action that is the cornerstone of any successful effort to prevent these unfortunate, unexpected events - let alone to improve your OEE scores over time. That action will also require the support of organizational leaders in more ways than one. Downtime Tracking: Understanding Your Data Again, effective downtime tracking is about more than just confirmation that you have a problem. If you only knew when an unplanned downtime event started and stopped you wou
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Embracing the "Real-Time" Nature of Machine Downtime Tracking

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Time. It doesn't matter what type of business you're running - it's absolutely one of the most valuable assets you have. Indeed, that's a big part of what makes tracking machine downtime so appealing to so many - it helps identify problems quickly so that you can take corrective action just as fast. But at the same time, some people don't seem to lean into the "real-time" nature of equipment downtime tracking quite as much as they should. They get the insight they need right away, but they're still reacting in the same way they used to. Instead, they need to be as proactive as possible. Getting to this point will require a bit of a perspective shift and will likely require you to keep a few key things in mind. Instant Insight Empowers Instant Action If you're only investing in a downtime tracking solution so that you can instantly know A) when a machine is running, and B) when it isn't, you're only tapping into a fraction of the poten
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Why the Time Period is Critical When Tracking OEE

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It's important to remember that the goal of OEE (and machine downtime tracking) in general isn't just to highlight everything that is going right with your manufacturing efforts. Sure, everyone likes a nice pat on the back every now and again - a confirmation that their hard work is paying off. But you're also looking for opportunities to improve, too, which means paying attention to trends as they develop. The issue is that OEE isn't a sprint - it's a marathon. The real actionable insight - the intelligence that will show you exactly what you need to do to thrive - will reveal itself over time. Instant gratification isn't what you're going for, here - if all your opportunities for improvement were obvious enough that they could be addressed overnight, the chances are high you would have recognized them and already done so by this point. Time is of the Essence All this is to say that if you're tracking machine downtime or OEE within the context of a sin
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