There are two types of downtime: planned and unplanned.

Planned downtime is a scheduled shutdown of manufacturing equipment or processes to perform maintenance, inspections, repairs, upgrades or manufacturing setups. It is essential to plan downtime for maintenance to keep your equipment in its optimum condition and to avoid unplanned downtime. Although planned downtime interrupts your manufacturing process, you are still in control of productivity processes.

Unplanned downtime occurs when there is an unexpected shutdown or failure of your manufacturing equipment or process. It causes foodstuffs to spoil if they are not packaged, as well as expensive delays in production and delivery schedules. Additionally, when operations are unstable, it is more difficult to adhere to environmental regulations and comply with sustainability measures. This could result in an increase of environmental incidents.

Thus, preventing production downtime is key to ensuring productivity.

Follow our seven tips to reduce machine downtime in your production line.

The system should gather and analyze data that gives insight into the equipment's total maintenance requirements. Interpretation of the data can help your teams resolve production issues by carrying out preventive maintenance. The implementation of such a system allows factories cut down on time lost due to production issues and prevent costly unplanned downtime by alerting employees of possible upcoming equipment failures.