How Downtime Tracking Solutions Help Benefit Production in Every Industry

Regardless of the industry that you’re operating in, downtime is always a major concern in the world of manufacturing. You have certain quotas you need to hit – certain benchmarks that mean you’re operating as productively as you can be. The minute that a critical piece of machinery goes offline, it can create a ripple effect in the worst possible way – one that could significantly delay not only your goals for the day, but for the week and even the month as well.

That, in essence, is what downtime tracking aims to help avoid. Any lost capacity can never truly be regained, even after things resume normal operations. But when you’re still recording machine downtime in a world of paper, you’re also likely dealing with inaccurate or incomplete data – making it impossible to actually act on the issues you’re experiencing. By embracing a downtime tracking solution like the one available from Thrive, you have the data you need to drive meaningful improvements – which in and of itself is the most important benefit of all.

Why Downtime Tracking Matters

Downtime tracking solutions help to automatically capture any starts and stops that happen on the shop floor – all via an accurate technique that virtually eliminates the possibility of human error. Yes, your operators can still make annotations to provide additional context but you’ll always know what went wrong, what the solution was and how long it took to fix.

It does this by way of reason codes that are directly attributed to the machines themselves. In other words you’ll know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what issue contributed to the downtime and what the effect ultimately was.

The major benefit here is that it increases the visibility of machine downtime instances exponentially. If a piece of machinery goes offline, the system captures that data immediately and forwards it to the people within your organization who are in a position to act. This lets them address the problem as quickly as possible, thus getting that machine back online faster than ever.

All of this in turn helps to create tangible improvements based on an accurate analysis of not only downtime instances related to your machines, but also the very real losses that you’ve accrued. Using historical data, you’ll be able to see what machines are typically problematic so that you can dive deep into why. If it’s an issue of maintenance, you’ll be able to schedule service during periods when they’re least likely to impact productivity. If it’s an issue of a machine that needs to be replaced, you can do so strategically to not impact the rest of the production line.

In the end, downtime tracking solutions help to reduce downtime losses – something that is historically the biggest factor holding back your OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) score. It helps generate superior visibility with live manufacturing KPI dashboards, giving you a better indication as to how you’re really doing at any given moment. It gives you invaluable insight into recurring issues so that you can react to them faster than ever – all of which contributes to the types of continuous improvement efforts that can take a good manufacturing facility and turn it into a truly great one.

If you’d like to find out more information about how downtime tracking solutions can benefit production in nearly every industry, or if you’d just like to speak to someone about your own situation in a bit more detail, please don’t delay – contact Thrive today.