Are you actually measuring your downtime? Even if you are, you might be missing opportunities that help beyond the correction of individual downtime events.

It’s 2 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. You’re the shift production supervisor, and you get a call from the press operator station. "We just had an overload trip on number four press pump," the voice says. You respond: "We had this problem yesterday, too. Let’s get maintenance down there and look at the pump."As you hang up, you’re thinking to yourself that the plant sure has a lot of problems with pumps.

Downtime information is essential to correct ongoing machinery problems and deficiencies, and to fine-tune maintenance and operations management systems. Many facilities, though, still do not measure downtime. Even if they do, they often miss opportunities that can help the plant in larger ways than correcting one downtime event.

Downtime costs plants millions of dollars each year in lost production, downgrade and loss of customers. That’s why it is so important to know what’s causing the downtime and how to use this information to correct the problem.

Downtime collection
There are various methods used to track downtime. The simplest is where an operator merely fills in a log book, noting what happened, what was done about it and how long production was down. This is where many older plants started–and where some of them have remained. Many

As industrial plants started to mature in the 1970s, many switched from using logbooks to adding downtime details on production forms that were collected at the end of the shift. These forms were kept on clipboards and made available for plant personnel to read.When a clipboard got full, the forms were filed.When using logbooks and forms, trending typically was not reviewed except for a month-end report that listed the total hours down. Sometimes, plants would separate the maintenance from operational downtime, maybe even by craft (electrical vs. mechanical) and, if they were clever enough, by equipment area such as press, former, drying, etc. Scheduled and unscheduled downtime would be tracked as well. It is important to evaluate both scheduled and unscheduled downtime to attempt to reduce each.

In the 1980s, the beginning of the computer era, plants started to use spreadsheets and databases to track downtime. In the first “computerized maintenance” years, many plants collected downtime from forms filled out by operators.Administrative personnel would fill in “electronic” spreadsheets and databases from these hand written forms. This allowed for misinterpreted information-which often resulted in misrepresentation of root cause.

By the 1990s, computers had become much faster and less expensive. The spreadsheets improved and some plants had operators inputting data into home-brewed downtime databases or were using software sold by various companies. It wasn’t until the mid ‘90s when computers were extremely fast and had large memories that plants really started to understand the importance of good downtime data.We then saw plants use more sophisticated...(Read whole article)