TL;DR: Reducing downtime in manufacturing is essential for improving efficiency, protecting profits, and enabling scalable growth. This guide explains how to reduce downtime in manufacturing by identifying root causes and applying proven strategies used by leading operations.
- Common causes include equipment failure, human error, software issues, poor maintenance, and parts shortages
- Preventative and predictive maintenance help catch issues before they halt production
- Ongoing employee training empowers teams to identify and resolve problems early
- Advanced technologies like real-time monitoring and digital twins improve visibility and performance
- Tracking KPIs such as OEE, MTTR, and MTBF helps anticipate failures and optimize operations
Your manufacturing operation’s efficiency represents an opportunity for your business.
A better and smarter process means the potential for greater profits and higher scalability. But if your operation suffers regular manufacturing downtime, even just temporarily, that means a hit to your profit, a limit to your growth potential, and a moment of instability for the customers who rely on your product. And regular downtime takes things a step further. All told, downtime is a red flag that an aspect of your manufacturing process is broken.
In this guide, we will walk through some of the tested solutions that leading manufacturers use to ensure their downtime is kept to an absolute minimum. Layer these practical strategies into your manufacturing operation and you can help maintain a better bottom line through more stable productivity.
Read on to discover how to reduce downtime in the manufacturing line you oversee.
Common Manufacturing Downtime Reasons
While every operation is unique in terms of product, scale, and process, there are a few common manufacturing downtime reasons that seem to happen regardless of industry. This includes:
- Breakdowns and equipment failures – Encapsulating worn moving parts, machine malfunctions, and more.
- Human error – As a result of poor training, lacking judgement, improper handling of machinery, or quick time-to-error faults.
- Software errors – Caused by software glitches, incompatible software, improper software updates, viruses, and more.
- Parts shortages – Stemming from a lack of logistical planning or external forces.
- Lack of maintenance – Including failure for regular maintenance, poor lubrication, part neglect, and more.
Modernization in any of these areas stands to help bolster your operation for better downtime resiliency and smarter processes to help support your revenue stream.
Considerations to Reduce Downtime in Manufacturing Settings
Conduct Smart Preventative Maintenance
One of the surest means of avoiding manufacturing downtime is to render it moot in the first place.
Predictive maintenance technologies can be installed to help identify pre-failure indicators (including temperature fluctuations and irregular vibration patterns) so problems can be fixed before they require full-stop downtime.
Meanwhile, employing preventative maintenance scheduling ensures each aspect of your manufacturing line is inspected and given the all-clear before larger problems compound.
Plan for Regular Employee Training
Ensuring your team knows when and how to identify problems in your manufacturing line is another reliable key to helping avoid downtime in the first place.
By investing in skill development for your operators and inspectors, you can empower your team to accurately identify the root cause of recurrent downtime and conduct autonomous maintenance to rectify it. Smaller types of effort here help to avoid larger line-worker involvement later, were a breakdown to occur.
Leverage Technology
There are countless ways new technologies can help modernize your line before failures can even occur.
Real time monitoring solutions help to enable rapid responses and preventative fixes. Meanwhile, digital twin systems can operate in parallel with your physical line, helping to collect and analyze performance data and indicate where machine operation may not be at 100%.
New system parts and software implementations can also help to avoid issues like cyberattacks or obsolescence failures, which cause much more complicated downtime when they occur and often require a slower ramp back up when compared with more intentional, iterative integrations.
Monitor Key Performance Metrics
If your operation is not already monitoring key performance indicators for your line’s flow, you’re potentially missing subtle clues about the next downtime failure on the horizon. By training your team to collect and analyze key performance metrics across your operation, you empower them to help solve failure issues before they arise. This includes:
- Overall equipment effectiveness
- Mean time to repair
- Mean time between failures
While the time to repair metric may unearth better training and procedural efficiencies, equipment effectiveness and MTBF showcases your operation’s resiliency against the critical forces it’s up against.
Fit Your Operation with Parts from a Leading Technology Provider
Sometimes, it’s the smallest details on your line that make the biggest impact to your operational flow. The parts you select and install need to be reliable, consistent, and easily replaceable. Anything less is a broken promise to your assembly team.
When considering new operational parts, consider ones made by a manufacturer you can trust. At Diversitech we pride ourselves as a technology leader in the Air Filtration & Dust Collection industry. With high quality parts designed to correctly and consistently perform in your application, peerless documentation and training services, and world-class product support, our team is here to equip your operation to eschew the unplanned downtime in manufacturing that threatens to undercut your business.