What is the equipment downtime?
Machine downtime can be defined as the period during which a machine or production plant is not functioning or cannot be used. The causes can be many, from the lack of raw materials to the absence of human resources. Much more often, however, machine downtime is caused by a technical fault or maintenance activity on a product.
When the machine stop is not programmed, the damages caused to a company can be considerable, especially in terms of economic and credibility losses. As a matter of fact, equipment downtime can cause losses more than ten times greater than those resulting from a scheduled production stop.
Considering the economic side of the problem, companies can lose up to $300,000 for every hour of unscheduled downtime (ITIC, 2016). If the estimate may seem excessive at first glance, considering the overall costs generated by the downtime of the plant, people can easily understand that the figure presented is highly realistic. They are:
- Cost of the equipment, which includes both the product and its maintenance;
- Workforce costs, which refers to all direct and indirect workers in the plant;
- Product cost, calculated by adding the cost per unit of production at each stage of the process and the hourly units at the machine centre;
- The start-up cost of the plant, which includes start-up costs, energy costs, setup costs, quality costs, the reduced percentage of production and scrap produced (including recycling costs and/or scrap value), quality (inspection costs and rework), and other start-up costs;
- Bottleneck cost, corresponding to the impact on downstream equipment at each stage of the process;
- Lost sales;
- Reduced production;
- Cost per hour of downtime, calculated over the downtime period;
- Waste;
- Service cost, which refers to expenses for temporary corrections and consultancy during machine downtime;
- Cost of repair, including shipping, testing, as well as repair itself;
- Tooling, which refers to the cost of replacing or reworking tools.
Image damage can also be very harmful to a company, especially cost-wise. From the point of view of reputation, in fact, failure to deliver an order or a delay can cause the loss of credibility of the company not only in the eyes of the customer to whom the work has not been delivered on time, but often and willingly, the dissatisfied customer makes "negative publicity" to other potential customers, who may decide to change supplier or otherwise may begin to look around for another partner.
The amount of damage is therefore directly related to the reduction of the Overall Equipment Effectiveness indicator (OEE), a percentage value that represents the overall performance of a production resource.
To obtain a satisfactory OEE (between 75-85%) is necessary to reduce unplanned downtime to a minimum. The ideal solution to overcome situations of this kind is to plan maintenance operations, when possible. Being able to rely on an external resource such as Renovis, ready to assist the company in case of sudden breakdowns, is an excellent guarantee to minimize downtime of a production plant.
Fast delivery products to avoid plant downtime
Renovis guarantees a prompt replacement of damaged parts that cannot be repaired in a short time by exchange service. The replacement of the faulty component is done with new or refurbished products, previously repaired by the Renovis team.
The used component will then be evaluated in Renovis' laboratories, and if it can be fixed, a discount will be issued on the purchase of the new one.
The high level of stock availability, together with the speed and reliability of the services offered, make Renovis Replace & Repair the ideal company to contact in the event of unscheduled downtime.
For more information, please contact us.
