Unscheduled Downtime

What is Unscheduled Downtime?

This performance indicator represents the total cumulative time production stops due to unexpected circumstances such as equipment failures or system outages. Businesses often closely monitor unscheduled downtime as a key metric in their maintenance strategy.

As the opposite to scheduled downtime, numerous or lengthy stops in production may disrupt supply chain management efforts and negatively impact client satisfaction due to delivery delays caused by lost productivity.

Discover how unscheduled downtime can impact your organization and learn ways to reduce disruptions due to unplanned work stoppages.

How is Unscheduled Downtime Calculated?

Unscheduled downtime represents the total duration in which equipment or systems are not operational outside of any planned maintenance, planned downtime, or scheduled breaks.

Calculating it involves tracking the time from when an unexpected failure occurs to the time that normal operations resume. The downtime tracking calculation includes:

1. Recording the start of unplanned downtime when the equipment or system halts operations due to an unplanned event.
2. Noting the end time when the equipment or system can resume planned activities at full capacity.
3. Subtracting the start time from the end time to get the total duration of the unplanned event.
4. Calculating the total combined duration of all unplanned downtime occurences over a time period.

As an example, if a machine in a manufacturing plant unexpectedly breaks down three times in a month causing a stoppage in production. Each event lasts 1 hour and 15 minutes, 2 hours, and 3 hours and 50 minutes respectively, the formula to determine total unplanned downtime would look something like this:

[UDT = 1:15 + 2:00 + 3:50; UDT = 7:05]

Total unplanned downtime comes to 7 hours and 5 minutes over the course of the month.

Many businesses also track unplanned downtime as a percentage of the total expected runtime. In the case of unplanned downtime as a percentage, in the example below, UDT represents unplanned downtime, D indicates total downtime, and T denotes the total planned runtime. If you’re considering using this method, the calculation would read this way.

[UDT = (D / T) x 100]

Using the total downtime example above, consider that the operation is expected to run a total of 200 hours over the course of the month. With the downtime as a percentage formula, you’d use the following calcualtion:  

[UDT = 7:05 / 200; UDT = 4.17%]

As a percentage of total runtime, unplanned downtime for that month was 4.17%. Higher unplanned downtime numbers typically indicate a need for improvements in preventive maintenance tactics or unreliable equipment.

Practical Examples of How Unscheduled Downtime is Used

As a key metric, unscheduled or unplanned downtime provides vital data that can inform many other actions in a manufacturing or commercial enterprise.

• Evaluate Maintenance Strategies: Growing unplanned downtime values can often indicate a need to examine maintenance practices to reduce reactive maintenance and devote more resources to preventive measures.
• Assess Reliability: This metric can help determine equipment reliability and provide information predict future performance levels.
• Identify Issues: Unplanned downtime statistics often shine a spotlight on recurring problems that might pose a greater risk if not addressed through repairs or replacement.
• Improve Processes: By analyzing root causes of downtime and tracing those causes to contributing actions, downtime percentage are helpful in improving processes and preventing future incidents.

Reducing Unscheduled Downtime

Minimizing unplanned downtime is crucial for maintaining productivity and efficiency and reducing downtime costs, ultimately leading to happier customers and clients. With some strategic planning, your organizaiton can avoid surprises and maximize operational runtimes. Consider incorporating these strategies into your standard operating procedures.

• Schedule Regular Maintenance: Implement a comprehensive preventive maintenance program. A proactive approach to upkeep enables you to catch issues before they lead to bigger problems.
• Incorporate Real-Time Monitoring: Use condition monitoring and predictive maintenance technologies to detect early signs of potential issues that could lead to unplanned downtime.
• Provide Training: Proper training helps ensure that staff understand the equipment and know how to conduct initial troubleshooting when issues arise.
• Maintain a Spare Parts Inventory: Keep critical spare parts in on hand to quickly replace faulty components at a moment’s notice without having to wait for deliveries.
• Invest in Quality Assets: High-quality equipment and compoent upgrades help ensure that your operation is less likely to experience unexpected failures.
• Leverage Technology: A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) provides tools for analyzing data and scheduling tasks. The data-driven insights it provides can help reduce unplanned downtime occurrences.

In Conclusion

Unscheduled or unplanned downtime oftean leads to undesirable results that impact production and efficiency, cause downtime costs, and prolonged downtime may also negatively affect production schedules. By accurately measuring and analyzing downtime incidents and implementing strategies to prevent them, a business can significantly improve its operational reliability, reduce downtime and, as a result, reduce the direct and indirect costs and lost revenue a downtime event or unplanned outage may cause.

FAQ

Which industries track unscheduled downtime?

Keeping track of unplanned downtime can benefit any industry or commercial enterprise. Data centers, cloud storage providers, and data centers keep close tabs on planned and unplanned downtime. Any downtime is critical for technology services such as these, potentially impacting thousands of clients or more with a single event. Unexpected downtime incidents also dramatically affect manufacturing, making this metric a critical indicator for organizations that produce goods.

How does unplanned downtime differ from scheduled downtime?

Scheduled downtime metrics reflect preplanned production shutdown for events such as maintenance. Unscheduled downtime strictly refers to unexpected shutdowns — often as the result of an equipment failure or emergency situation. When determining unplanned downtime measurements, many maintenance teams consider planned downtime as part of the operationsl runtime.

What other metrics to businesses track?

Organization track a wide variety of metrics to identify areas that need improvement and track their success. With their reliance on costly equipment, manufacturing facilities typically measure the mean time between failures (MTBF), indicating the typical length of time between experiencing a malfunction that causes a shutdown. Mean time to repair or replace (MTTR) measures the average time it takes to make an asset functional again after it breaks down. Several other production and maintenance metrics exist that a variety of industries utilize to measure their success, but these two are fairly consistent across all industries.