It doesn’t matter what sector of the industry you’re actually operating in, there’s one idea that everyone can agree on: manufacturing is expensive.
From the cost of specialized equipment to the salaries of the highly trained people that need to operate it. Even just keeping the lights on can be an enormous expense. In an environment where literally every minute has a dollar value attached to it, anything you can do to help ease a little bit of that burden is a step worth taking.
That’s a big part of what machine downtime tracking can help you do – just not exclusively in the one way that term implies.
Spending Money in All the Right Places
For starters, yes – any time a piece of equipment on a manufacturing line isn’t running, it costs money. Parts aren’t being produced. Someone needs to be paid to fix it. That person will probably need to order parts, and so on and so forth.
The thing is, that employee is being paid whether they’re fixing a machine or not. The same is true of the employees who were actually supposed to be operating the equipment (who are now likely sitting around, looking for something to do until things are back online).
When you’re proactive about machine downtime tracking in a way that allows you to avoid problems altogether, the employees operating those machines are always working. Meaning, they’re always producing the volume they need and are generating revenue in a way that justifies their own salaries.
Those maintenance employees are now free not to react, but to anticipate. They can devote their attention to measures that actually drive revenue (as opposed to simply trying to “stop the bleeding” after an incident, which is what they do now). They, too, can start making your business money.
The overall theme is that machine downtime tracking is about doing more with the resources you already have. People are no longer just spinning their wheels. Machines are being utilized to their full potential, maximizing your productivity and reducing their own total cost of ownership. There are more productive minutes in a day, which means that you’re not wasting money to power a facility where people aren’t generating revenue.
The money that you’re saving can be funneled into other areas of your business where it can make the biggest impact, allowing you to make improvements that you may not otherwise have had the resources for. It creates a ripple effect in the best possible way. It begins with simply increasing the availability of the equipment that your business depends on. But it quickly balloons into something far larger and more important than that, too. This is what makes tracking machine downtime an investment that soon starts to pay for itself.
If you’d like to find out more information about how equipment downtime tracking can help save costs across your manufacturing enterprise, or if you’d just like to see what an innovative solution like ours can do to improve your efforts, please don’t delay – contact the team at Thrive today.
