How to Cut Down Manufacturing Downtime and Improve Efficiency

Factories lose 5% to 20% of their productive capacity during downtime. [1]

So, if you’re experiencing more frequent and long-lasting downtime, then you’re most likely suffering more productivity and financial losses. Plus, frequent downtime leads to increased employee psychological stress at best, or worse, you might be sued for constantly putting their lives in danger.

The only way around this is by getting your downtime hours under control or by reducing them as much as you can.

This article contains a practical guide on how you can cut down on manufacturing downtime and a software recommendation that can help you achieve this quickly.

But before we begin, do you know the type of downtime that is causing you to lose money or even how to categorize asset downtime? 

Read on to find out more. 

Categories of Manufacturing Downtime

Here are four major categories of downtime that are making manufacturing companies lose time, money and productivity:

Planned Downtime

This is a positive type of downtime. It includes scheduled periods when managers pause production to service and maintain manufacturing equipment. During planned downtime, technicians predict and repair breakdown issues that might lead to an unplanned downtime.

It also helps to keep the manufacturing equipment functioning at its maximum and keeps the quality of products at its best. In addition to that, it keeps the work environment safe and helps extend the lifespan of your equipment.

While this type of downtime is controllable and contributes to financial savings, things can degrade quickly if you schedule it too often. More info on this later.

Unplanned Downtime

This occurs when manufacturing equipment fails unexpectedly. It halts the entire process if it happens to critical manufacturing equipment and reduces the quality of the products if it happens to secondary equipment. This, in turn, leads to production delays, an increase in operational costs, customer dissatisfaction, damage to reputation, loss of revenue, etc.

Unplanned downtime also leads to unexpected staffing issues like irregular work schedules, increased stress, potential layoffs or relocations, and some of the legal actions we mentioned in the introduction.

External Downtime

This is a type of downtime that occurs due to factors outside the control of an organization. It is like unplanned downtime, but it’s not caused by failure of manufacturing equipment. Instead, it is caused by external factors like supply chain issues, natural disasters, regulatory changes, transportation delays, supplier emergencies etc.

Like unplanned downtime, this type also results in significant operational consequences like production delays, increased cost, revenue loss, supply chain vulnerability, customer dissatisfaction, etc.

How Can LLumin Help

You can use LLumin, a CMMS software, to track and categorize the type of downtime that is negatively affecting your manufacturing company. When installed, LLumin automatically logs all downtime events as they occur. It records the time, duration, cause and impact of each event. LLumin also provides you with insights that you can implement to avoid machine downtime.  

Common Causes of Downtime

Here are some of the most common causes of downtime in manufacturing: 

Hardware Failure

Hardware failures are the most common cause of downtime, and according to Pbsnow, it causes 45% of all unplanned downtime. Hardware failure is usually caused by maintenance negligence, mishandling of the equipment, and not upgrading equipment, especially if it is connected to an IoT device. 

Overheating, power surges, wear and tear, dust and debris accumulation, and aging of equipment, among others, can also cause it. Read on to discover how to control hardware failure in your manufacturing equipment. 

Human Error

Human error is another common cause of downtime in the manufacturing industry, accounting for over 23% of unplanned downtime. [2] In the manufacturing industry, a single mistake, whether accidental or due to negligence, can trigger unplanned downtime and all the consequences that come with it. 

One way to reduce the frequency of human error is by holding training and safety sessions to teach your staff the best practices to follow when handling manufacturing equipment. You can also invest in automated manufacturing equipment to minimize human involvement in the operation process and significantly reduce human error. 

Malicious Sabotage

This is a more intentional form of disrupting the operational process in a company. It includes vandalism and insider threats or cyberattacks. During the downtime caused by malicious sabotage, manufacturing data may be compromised and manipulated, leading to compromised data integrity and reputational damage.

The best way to prevent malicious sabotage is by implementing physical and cybersecurity measures. You should also conduct employee background checks and regularly monitor your systems to detect suspicious activity before it becomes too late.

Power Cuts and Natural Disasters

Power outages and natural disasters are among the various causes of external downtime. According to Invenio IT, these events account for only 5% of downtime incidents. 

However, the duration of downtime caused by these factors is typically longer compared to those caused by human error or equipment failure. This extended duration is due to the fact that power outages and natural disasters are beyond the company’s control and can require a significant amount of time for normal operations to resume. 

6 Best Strategies for Reducing Downtime

Now that you’ve identified the type of downtime affecting your company and its root causes, you must be wondering about how to reduce unplanned downtime. This section shares six strategies that you can implement to reduce downtime.

1. Schedule Preventive Maintenance

During preventive maintenance, technicians address potential breakdown issues before they lead to unplanned downtime. They also ensure that minor issues are addressed promptly before they escalate to major problems.

Furthermore, preventive maintenance activities are usually carried out during non-peak hours to reduce any negative impact on operations. They are usually less expensive than the repairs that occur during unplanned downtime. They also ensure the timely replacement of worn-out parts, help to extend the life of manufacturing equipment and reduce the risk of accidents and injuries.

How LLumin Can Help You Carry out Preventive Maintenance

The first step to successfully carry out preventive maintenance and reduce equipment downtime is to have an accurate inventory of all your manufacturing assets. This can be done manually, but LLumin can help you do it automatically. 

When integrated into your company’s software, LLumin catalogs all your manufacturing assets. It captures details like technical specifications, maintenance history, warranty information and other details that will help you accurately schedule preventive maintenance sections.

LLumin also helps you create detailed maintenance tasks for each manufacturing equipment. It allows you to create step-by-step maintenance checklists to ensure that all your preventive maintenance activities are consistent and accurate.

Furthermore, LLumin helps you to automatically schedule preventive maintenance tasks for your manufacturing equipment. It does this using your previous maintenance schedule and information on how often you use your equipment. It can also automatically generate work orders and send out timely reminders to the technical team to ensure that maintenance tasks are performed on time.

2. Explore Predictive Maintenance

In the “categories of manufacturing downtime” section above, we mentioned that planned downtime is a type of positive downtime that helps keep manufacturing operations running smoothly. Well, it also has its downsides. When scheduled too often, planned downtime can affect employee morale, lead to decreased productivity and increased operational costs.

Predictive maintenance is one of the best strategies to reduce planned downtime. It involves monitoring the condition and performance of manufacturing equipment to identify when maintenance needs to be performed. In fact, predictive maintenance can reduce downtime by up to 90% and almost eliminate all manufacturing equipment breakdowns. [3] It also reduces operating costs, enhances equipment safety, improves productivity and extends equipment lifespan.

How LLumin Can Help You Carry out Predictive Maintenance

The LLumin Computer Maintenance Management Software (CMMS+) comes with IoT sensors that integrate into your manufacturing equipment and carry out real-time asset monitoring. 

These sensors, together with their AI algorithms, help detect potential breakdown issues early and help you reduce manufacturing downtime. LLumin’s data analytics and machine learning algorithms rely on historical and real-time data to help it accurately predict potential equipment failure.

When it detects a potential breakdown issue, it sends notifications to alert you of this discovery. It also generates detailed reports about the issues and provides insights on the best maintenance tasks to carry out.

Moreover, when configured, LLumin enables you to combine its predictive maintenance feature with its maintenance management workflow feature. That way, you can automatically sync all predictive maintenance issues into your maintenance schedule. This makes sure that no potential breakdown issues are missed during the next scheduled maintenance interval.

3. Identify and Prioritize Critical Processes

Another way to reduce manufacturing machine downtime is to focus your maintenance efforts on processes that have the highest impact on production output and customer deliverables. This could include the cutting, drilling and milling process, or the assembly or the quality control and testing process.

By identifying and addressing the maintenance of equipment used in critical manufacturing processes, you are minimizing the likelihood of unplanned breakdown. This strategy enables you to efficiently allocate maintenance resources to these critical equipment. 

It is usually easy to identify equipment that is essential to the manufacturing process – especially if you’re an operations or plant manager. But if you’re not, then here are some key steps to identify processes whose unplanned downtime could halt the entire manufacturing process:

1. Map Out the Production Flow: This process involves creating a detailed map or flowchart of your production process. You can either do this manually or automatically using LLumin’s 3D rendering, asset management and workflow management features. 

2. Gather Downtime Data and Metrics: Next, collect the historical data on your manufacturing equipment downtime in the last 12 to 24 months. This gives you insight into the common cause of downtime, its frequency, and the duration of downtime for each manufacturing equipment

3. Assess Impact of Downtime: Finally, evaluate the impact of each equipment’s downtime on the general manufacturing process. Here, you should consider factors like production output reduction, delay in customer deliverables, impact on interdependent processes, increased operational costs, potential loss of revenue, etc. There are some KPI Metrics that can help you identify critical manufacturing equipment.  

Some of them include

Downtime Assessment KPIs	Their Uses
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)	This measures the average time manufacturing equipment functions before it breaks down. This KPI helps you measure the reliability of each piece of equipment.
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)	This tells you the average time it takes to repair each manufacturing equipment, helping you identify which critical manufacturing equipment may need more robust and frequent maintenance attention.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)	This is a combination of your equipment’s availability, performance and quality metrics. The OEE gives you comprehensive insights into the efficiency of each piece of equipment and tells you if your critical equipment is underperforming.
Throughput	This metric enables you to track the amount of material or product that a manufacturing equipment produces within a specific timeframe. This KPI also identifies the equipment that significantly contributes to the production output of your manufacturing process.

4. Quick Changeover Techniques

These are backup techniques put in place as a recovery plan for addressing unplanned downtime. It might not proactively reduce the number of downtime in manufacturing, but it reduces the amount of operation time that is wasted during each event.

Recovery techniques are sometimes tailored to address the specific causes of downtime for each piece of manufacturing equipment. For example, the recovery strategy for equipment reliant on a power supply will differ from the strategy for systems using alternative energy sources like wind or solar.

Quick recovery techniques can also be generalized to quickly swap a piece of manufacturing equipment for another. In manufacturing, this process is called the SMED (Single-Minute Exchange of Die). 

This is a technique that is aimed to reduce the time required to switch from one production process or equipment setup to another in ideally under 10 minutes. Aside from being an effective quick changeover technique, it allows for smaller batch-size production, which in turn reduces inventory costs and improves cash flow. It also enhances product quality by reducing errors associated with complex and lengthy setups.

To implement an SMED process in your manufacturing company:

• Start by documenting the current equipment setup procedure in detail.

• Next, measure the time it takes to complete each step in the setup process. This will identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement.

• The third step is to categorize setup activities into internal tasks and external tasks. Internal tasks are performed while the equipment is still working while external setup tasks are carried out when the manufacturing equipment is not working.

• After that, identify internal setup tasks that can be converted to external tasks and convert them. For instance, in an automotive assembly line, preparing and positioning components like bolts and fixtures are usually done when the assembly robot is running, thereby making it an internal task. However this task can be converted into an external task, thereby making sure that the process keeps going on when the assembly robot fails unexpectedly.

• Identify external manufacturing setup tasks that can be carried out concurrently to minimize downtime. For example, while the assembling process mentioned above is being carried out, you can carry out a quality inspection on completed parts, pre-assemble subcomponents, set up and calibrate tools and dies for the next batch of production, etc.

• Finally, make a checklist of standard setup tasks; this is to make sure that no setup process is skipped during a changeover/recovery time.

Reduce All Forms of Downtime With LLumin

LLumin is a Computer Maintenance Management System that offers a lot of features that will help you avoid machine downtime. Some of our advanced features include:

• Compliance and Safety: LLumin helps manufacturing companies maintain high safety standards and reduce the risk of compliance-related disruptions. It does this by automatically documenting maintenance records and audit trails. Its accurate and detailed maintenance histories and inspection logs keep you ever ready for unexpected visits from external auditors.

• Customizable Reporting: LLumin offers dashboards and auto-generated reports, which serve as valuable data for decision-making. These reports enable manufacturing companies to track performance, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to reduce downtime and enhance operational efficiency.

How LLumin Helped Caterpillar Plant Reduce Downtime in Manufacturing

Caterpillar is a popular manufacturer of construction equipment, off-highway diesel and natural gas engines, etc. LLumin integrates with its manufacturing equipment via sensors to collect real-time data, which it uses to predict potential failures before they occur.

We also help Caterpillar prioritize maintenance tasks based on criticality and predicted failure risks. This provides the company with actionable insights to help them make informed preventive maintenance decisions. Plus, LLumin offers remote monitoring access to their equipment data, which enables them to monitor and manage assets across various locations. This has helped Caterpillar reduce response times to maintenance needs and minimize downtime. 

Interested? Schedule your free software demo to automatically avoid machine downtime.

Conclusion

Downtime of any kind can cost a manufacturing company as much as $260,000 an hour. [4] One of the best ways to effectively reduce it is to understand the type of downtime you’re facing and its causes, then implement the above-mentioned downtime-reducing strategies. 

Another way to do this is by using a CMMS+ tool like LLumin to automate your downtime reduction strategies. Schedule your free software demo now. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Resources

1. https://blog.isa.org/downtime-factory-plant-industrial-costs-risks  
2. https://www.engineering.com/human-error-is-worse-in-manufacturing-compared-to-other-sectors/  
3. https://www.advancedmanufacturing.org/preventative-maintenance-from-downtime-to-uptime/article_17f64d34-3bb2-11ef-b7cd-2f541825963b.html  
4. https://www.iiot-world.com/predictive-analytics/predictive-maintenance/the-actual-cost-of-downtime-in-the-manufacturing-industry/