Equipment downtime
Equipment downtime is time during which equipment is unavailable for its intended use, whether because it has failed or because it is being serviced.
Equipment downtime is time during which equipment is unavailable for its intended use, whether because it has failed or because it is being serviced.
← Equipment management glossary
Also called: machine downtime, unplanned downtime.
Planned downtime is scheduled — servicing, inspection, calibration. It is a cost you chose, at a time you chose, and it can be arranged around demand.
Unplanned downtime is failure. It costs more than the same hours of planned downtime, usually several times more, because it arrives without warning: work in progress stops, people stand idle, parts are sourced at emergency rates, and something downstream misses a commitment.
The whole argument for preventive maintenance is trading cheap planned hours for expensive unplanned ones. Tracking the two separately is what lets you check whether that trade is actually working.
Direct repair — parts and labour, the only one most organisations record. Lost output — what would have been produced or delivered. Idle resources — people and other equipment waiting. Knock-on cost — missed deadlines, expedited shipping, hired replacements, and the customer relationship.
Because only the first is usually captured, downtime is systematically under-costed, which makes maintenance budgets look expensive relative to a benefit nobody measured.
Availability = (Uptime ÷ (Uptime + Downtime)) × 100
A machine available 152 of 160 scheduled hours in a month is at 95% availability. Track planned and unplanned downtime separately, or the number hides which kind you have.
Organisations that record only repair cost see maintenance as an expense rather than an offset, because the far larger cost of unplanned stoppage was never measured.
Itefy tracks condition and uptime per item and reports on downtime, so the pattern behind repeated failures becomes visible instead of anecdotal. Read more.
Yes, but record it separately. Both make equipment unavailable; only one is a problem, and a single combined figure cannot tell you which you have.
It depends entirely on the equipment and what a stoppage costs. Chasing very high availability on non-critical equipment spends maintenance budget where a failure would not have mattered.
Preventive maintenance is servicing equipment on a planned schedule — by time or by usage — to reduce the chance of it failing unexpectedly in use.
DefinitionMTBF is the average operating time between one failure and the next for repairable equipment, used as a reliability measure.
DefinitionUtilisation rate is the share of available time that a piece of equipment is actually in use, expressed as a percentage.
DefinitionA service history is the complete record of maintenance, repairs and inspections carried out on a specific item, with dates, work done and cost.
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