If you had to make a list of all the reasons why manufacturing organizations invest in tracking machine downtime, cost savings would undoubtedly be right at the top.
Obviously, every minute of unplanned downtime has a dollar value attached to it in terms of lost productivity, the expenses needed to get a machine back up and running, and your ability to use that machine’s full potential to generate a profit for your company. The longer these types of problems are allowed to go on, the more they add up.
Even if you only used machine downtime tracking for this purpose alone, you’d still get your money out of your investment. But once you begin to go deeper, you get a sense of just how impactful it can be across your production lines – especially in a situation where you may already be dealing with limited resources and are having a hard time unlocking their full potential.
Battling Limited Resources, or: How to Work Smarter, Not Harder
One of the great things about equipment downtime tracking in general is that it helps you see the bigger picture in terms of what is really going on with your manufacturing efforts.
If you’re not tracking machine downtime at all, it’s likely that part of the issue with your limited resource stems from either machines that are unpredictably going offline, inefficient maintenance that is simply delaying the inevitable instead of solving a problem, or maintenance that is being performed without thought to how to diminish its impact. With the right solution by your side, you’ll be able to address all of these. You might not have access to more resources than you already did, but you’ll be using them in a smarter and more forward-thinking way.
However, if you know the overall costs associated with fixing these problems, you can adequately compare them to the costs of preventative maintenance to keep machines running effectively in the first place. You know when to take them down for routine maintenance at a time when their impact will be limited. You can also contextualize those costs against the possibility of expansion.
Using actionable, historical data, you can start to see how much money you’re spending in maintenance and how much money you could be saving if you expanded your production line to help grapple with resource allocation issues. Yes, you might be spending more up-front – but that investment will likely pay for itself far sooner than you would think because there would be no instance where your people are sitting around without machines to operate or products to produce.
But the best part of all is that you don’t have to guess as to which scenario is the best one for you – you’ll know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, because you’ll have the data to prove it.
If you’d like to find out more information about how equipment downtime tracking can help relieve issues that you may have been experiencing in terms of limited resources, or to speak to someone about your own needs in a bit more detail, please don’t delay – contact the team at Thrive today.