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Showing posts from December, 2023

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

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