Utilisation rate
Utilisation rate is the share of available time that a piece of equipment is actually in use, expressed as a percentage.
Utilisation rate is the share of available time that a piece of equipment is actually in use, expressed as a percentage.
← Equipment management glossary
Also called: equipment utilization, utilization rate.
The formula is trivial; the denominator is where the argument is. Available time can mean calendar hours, working hours, or working hours minus planned maintenance. All three are defensible — but a rate calculated one way cannot be compared with a rate calculated another, and mixing them within one organisation makes the whole metric useless.
Pick working hours minus planned downtime unless you have a reason not to, write the definition down, and apply it everywhere.
There is no universal target, and high is not automatically good. Equipment at 95% utilisation has no slack: one breakdown or one overrun and something downstream stops. Equipment at 15% is either genuinely spare capacity you are choosing to hold, or capital sitting idle that could be redeployed or sold.
The useful reading is comparative. Two identical machines where one runs at 70% and the other at 20% is a signal about location, booking behaviour or a fault nobody logged — and that is a question worth asking.
First, booked time is not used time. If your figure comes from reservations rather than actual checkouts, it measures intention. Comparing planned against actual is how you find out how far apart they are.
Second, utilisation says nothing about value. A machine used constantly for low-value work scores well; an expensive item used rarely but for critical jobs scores badly. Read it alongside cost and purpose, not alone.
Utilisation rate = (Time in use ÷ Time available) × 100
A machine used 26 hours in a 40-hour week is at 65% utilisation. Subtract planned maintenance from available time and the same usage reads higher — which is why the definition has to be fixed.
Without utilisation data, purchasing decisions are made on whoever complains loudest about availability, and idle equipment is invisible because nothing reports on absence of use.
Itefy derives utilisation from actual checkouts rather than bookings, per item and across the fleet, and its planned-vs-actual report shows the gap between the two. Read more.
It depends entirely on the role of the equipment, and very high figures are a warning as much as an achievement — there is no slack for breakdowns or overruns. Compare identical items against each other rather than against an external benchmark.
Checkouts. Bookings measure what people intended to do. The difference between the two is itself one of the more useful things you can measure.
Equipment management is the practice of tracking what equipment an organisation owns, where it is, who has it, and what condition it is in — across its whole working life.
DefinitionAn equipment inventory system is software that maintains a live register of individual equipment items and records every booking, handover, movement and repair against them.
DefinitionEquipment depreciation is the accounting method for spreading an item's cost across the years it is expected to be useful, rather than expensing it all at purchase.
DefinitionPreventive maintenance is servicing equipment on a planned schedule — by time or by usage — to reduce the chance of it failing unexpectedly in use.
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