What is the true cost of downtime in a manufacturing business?
Posted
Downtime costs the manufacturing industry in excess of £180bn per annum!
Every time a machine breaks down or doesn’t function as it should, life’s scarcest commodity is lost – time.
It would be fair to say that regardless of industry or size, for every single business, time is money. Whether that be wages, number of units produced, or even the length of the working day. Everything is affected by time, that’s why downtime is such a headache for any business.
From the moment a machine breaks down, the clock is ticking, and as the minutes tick by the following consequences play out. Production is slowed or has to stop, resulting in not only lost production time, but also a backlog of work is created. For companies with packed production schedules this is an absolute nightmare. Customer loyalty is affected as their requirements cannot be met in the timescales they specified. Often a production line stop with a supplier has a direct effect on their customers as parts they need to complete their products are missing.
This shows the direct impact that machine downtime has on a company’s bottom line. If a machine does break down, every moment is critical, engineers need to be on site to fix the problem or replacements need to be sorted in double-quick time.
