We have published many articles on Manufacturing Transformation about the various opportunities to implement continuous process improvement as part of a strategy to improve operational excellence. Maintenance management plays an important role as part of this strategy, and represents a common objective every manufacturer shares – output drops to zero if your equipment stops running.

Who would argue against the suggestion to reduce downtime? No one. But, if it comes down to making an investment to improve your performance, then it becomes necessary to measure that investment. Here is where it can often be the case that the “obvious” investment can be tricky to justify and measure.

Taylor Short, CMMS market researcher at Software Advice, states, “Machine downtime, especially for manufacturing companies, can bring operations and revenue to a halt. Knowing an estimate of the hourly costs of machine downtime is a critical number to have in mind; it can be useful in justifying the investment of a maintenance management system that can minimize downtime with smart preventive maintenance and predictive capabilities.”

The team at Software Advice offered to share a tool (see below) that can be of assistance in calculating your cost of downtime, which can then be used to help make better investment decisions. Taylor Short continued, “Maintenance professionals can enter data about their company in the tool, such as costs for labor, average revenue and average profit per unit produced. The tool will produce estimates that serve as incentive to avoid downtime with the assistance of modern maintenance software.”

Special thanks to Software Advice for sharing this calculation tool!