6 Strategies To Reduce Downtime
Unfortunately, nearly any industry or business can suffer from downtime — but this is especially true for manufacturing.
While planned downtime allows employees, machines, and software to proactively prevent unexpected outages, unplanned downtime can drain critical resources and effectively halt product-making (and profit-making) processes indefinitely.
Indeed, the cascading effects of human errors, poor maintenance, security breaches, and equipment failure can cause manufacturing downtimes to last from a few hours to multiple weeks or even months.
The following guide includes six key strategies manufacturers can use to optimize what could otherwise be wasted time. Manufacturers need to act immediately to fully benefit from implementing these strategies — the reality is that unplanned downtime can occur at any moment.
With these procedures in place, your company can more effectively recover from downtime and minimize its impact on your bottom line.
What To Know About the Domino Effect of Downtime
Downtime threatens multiple aspects of manufacturing, from efficiency and productivity to profitability. For example, in the automotive industry alone, unplanned downtime comes at a cost of $2.3 million per hour.
In the manufacturing industry especially, the costs of downtime can ripple through your operations. According to some research, the average manufacturer experiences 800 hours of equipment downtime each year.
To put that in perspective, that’s almost 15 hours of equipment downtime every week.
Needless to say, this halting of your operations also halts your company’s profitability. Experts estimate that industrial manufacturers lose $50 billion annually due to unplanned downtime. These dramatic effects emphasize the importance of preventative measures and proactive strategies to minimize and bounce back from manufacturing stoppages.
What Are Some Strategies To Reduce Downtime?
Even outside of manufacturing, unplanned downtime costs some of the largest companies 11% of their annual revenue — which equates to roughly $1.4 trillion.
Save your company from these damaging effects with the following six strategies:
1. Monitoring, Preventative, and Predictive Maintenance Protocols
Comprehensive maintenance schedules that monitor, prevent, and predict potential issues act as the first line of defense against downtime.
Daily monitoring of machines, systems, and processes ensures your assembly line is on the right track. Augmenting that value with preventative maintenance provides a 12% to 18% cost-saving advantage over reactive maintenance, a return on investment that gains additional value when paired with predictive maintenance.
The reporting and analysis involved in predictive maintenance enables your company to identify and address anomalies retroactively and proactively. Evaluating your workforce’s response to past downtime can inform and improve future instances to minimize their effects, especially in the manufacturing industry. Incorporating techniques such as oil analysis can be a part of predictive maintenance, helping to identify potential issues before they lead to downtime.
The insight your company gains can also help you identify which equipment components or assembly procedures are most likely to cause or create downtime so you can respond accordingly.
2. Perform Regular Inspections and Risk Audits
Many manufacturers can identify potential causes of downtime on their own, but hiring a specialized risk auditor can reveal concerns hiding in blind spots — or even in plain sight.
Audits can take time and may require some delays here and there, but the investment typically comes with a hefty return. The corresponding reports outline what issues can occur and provide manufacturers with a starting point to prioritize assets, cultivate training, and develop a response plan.
3. Invest in Employee Training
Speaking of training, most factory workers undergo some form of employee education before or while they’re hired.
Although this training helps them perform their daily job duties, it can also be augmented to include cross-training to take over for others during downtime. Utilizing, encouraging, and developing their problem-solving can prove valuable when you need it most.
Beyond downtime response, cross-training also allows your company to build flexibility into your workforce, increasing profits. It’s much easier to continue operating when most of your workforce understands multiple aspects of the assembly line and can adapt accordingly.
Seek resources to support your workers with the training to optimize downtime.
4. Develop a Downtime Response Plan
Although qualified workers can reduce the costly effects of downtime, any efforts are in vain unless there’s a clear and established protocol to follow when downtime occurs.
Assembling a team to develop a response plan ensures your workforce is ready to spring into action when the time comes. The more detailed your downtime response plan, the better your chances of minimizing lasting effects.
Downtime response plans can include multiple steps, such as who workers should report to or where they should assemble. Review these plans with your employees to ensure they understand what’s expected of them.
Setting aside time to practice responding to downtime can cause short-term delays, but the lessons learned during these drills can pay dividends when the real deal happens.
5. Implement a Data Backup Strategy
Even in the hands-on manufacturing world, data can become an unfortunate casualty of downtime.
Internal documentation, accounting data, and customer information could disappear forever if you don’t implement a strong data backup strategy. Beyond this vital strategy, businesses should also monitor for syncing disruptions to ensure continuity.
Many cloud-based backup solutions are popular because they can be accessed from multiple devices in various locations. Typically, cloud-based backup software prompts you to sync regularly and alerts you if there’s a break. Securely storing your manufacturing data ensures a swift recovery and protects your business from having to start from scratch.
6. Integrate Scalability
Growing manufacturers may find that their existing infrastructure offers static support, limiting scalability and triggering downtime to locate and transition to a better solution.
For example, customers who deal with fleet management may find that their fueling services can’t keep up with demand or that their mom-and-pop automotive repair shop becomes easily overwhelmed with only two or three maintenance tasks.
Integrating scalability into these critical areas of manufacturing can set your company up for success and future growth.
Minimize the Cost of Downtime With Cadence
Continuous improvement stands at the core of our values at Cadence, where people, distribution, and excellence are our primary focus.
Through partnerships with many well-known brands, we actively seek to help manufacturers of all sizes improve their response to downtime through quality products and services.
Call us at 336-629-2061 to learn more about how Cadence can support your company and our dedication to a superior customer experience.
Sources:
The True Cost of Downtime 2024 | Siemens
Operations & Maintenance Best Practices Guide: Release 3.0 | Federal Energy Management Program