Most manufacturers know downtime is expensive. What they underestimate is how expensive, because the number on the maintenance log only tells half the story. When a machine stops unexpectedly, the direct cost of lost output is just the start. The real damage runs through your schedule, your delivery dates, your margins and your team’s time for the rest of the day.

The standard approach is to calculate lost output per hour. Take your machine’s hourly rate, multiply it by hours lost, and that’s your downtime cost.

It’s a reasonable starting point, but it misses a significant portion of the true impact.

In a typical SME manufacturing operation, a single unplanned stoppage on a critical machine, say a CNC machining centre or a fabrication cell, triggers a chain of decisions. A planner has to rejig the schedule. A supervisor has to redirect operators. Jobs that were on track are now at risk. Customers may need to be called. Some of those calls result in expedited deliveries, overtime or missed order fulfilment penalties.

None of that shows up in a simple lost-hours calculation.

If you ask most production managers to estimate their annual downtime cost, they’ll give you a figure based on machine hours and hourly rates. Rarely does that figure account for:

• Labour standing idle while a machine is down or waiting for a fitter
• Schedule disruption as other jobs are moved around to compensate
• Overtime costs to recover lost hours later in the week
• Material waste if a process stops mid-cycle and the part is scrapped
• Customer penalties or lost orders when delivery dates slip as a result

When you start adding these in, the number climbs quickly. Research consistently shows that manufacturers who track downtime properly discover it costs two to three times their initial estimate.

Here’s what tends to happen in practice. A machine goes down mid-morning. The supervisor finds out when an operator comes to report it. By the time a fitter is called and the fault diagnosed, an hour has passed. The job that was running is now late, and it’s one of three jobs feeding an assembly cell that afternoon.

The planner scrambles. Two operators are redeployed to catch up elsewhere. The assembly cell runs short of parts and sits idle for 45 minutes. Two customer orders are pushed out by a day. One of those customers calls to chase.

The maintenance system records one machine stoppage lasting 90 minutes. The actual disruption cost the business four to five hours of productive capacity across the operation.

This is why downtime visibility matters as much as downtime prevention.

The factories that have a handle on their true downtime cost tend to use shop floor data capture software to log machine status in real time, not retrospectively. When operators log a stoppage the moment it happens, and that event is linked to the affected jobs and schedule, you can start to see the full picture.

Over time, patterns emerge. Certain machines account for a disproportionate share of disruption. Certain shifts or times of week carry more unplanned stoppages. That data is what drives a maintenance strategy that actually reduces downtime, rather than simply recording it.

FAQ: Can smaller manufacturers afford to track downtime properly?

Yes. Modern production tracking software for SME manufacturers is designed to be straightforward to implement and does not require large IT infrastructure. Many businesses go live within 90 days.

The biggest shift is that supervisors and planners stop reacting and start anticipating. When a stoppage is logged immediately and linked to the schedule, a planner can see within minutes which jobs are affected and make a decision, not 90 minutes later when the problem has already cascaded.

Over time, real-time visibility of machine status also helps maintenance teams prioritise. Instead of servicing machines on a fixed calendar, they can focus on the equipment that is causing the most disruption.

The true cost of machine downtime is typically two to three times the lost-output figure, once schedule disruption, idle labour and recovery costs are included.

Most maintenance logs only capture the stoppage itself, not the knock-on effects across the rest of the shop floor.

Real-time shop floor data capture gives planners the information they need to respond quickly, before a single stoppage cascades into multiple late jobs.

Tracking downtime accurately over time reveals patterns that allow manufacturers to move from reactive maintenance to planned prevention.

SME manufacturers do not need complex or expensive systems to start measuring downtime properly. Most can be operational within a matter of weeks.

DynamxMFG gives production teams real-time visibility of machine status, job progress and operator activity across the shop floor. When a machine goes down, it shows up immediately in the system, linked to the jobs affected and the schedule impact. Planners can make decisions in minutes rather than hours.

Over time, the data captured by DynamxMFG builds a clear picture of where downtime is concentrated and what it is costing the business, not just in lost machine hours, but in schedule disruption, late deliveries and overtime. That is the information you need to make a real dent in it.

Book a short demo of DynamxMFG to see how it fits your shop floor.