Downtime is one of the leading causes of wasted resources within manufacturing, but where companies fail is when they chalk up their losses to the cost of doing business. Issues happen in various forms, and while some can’t be avoided, taking a back-seat approach to how you respond can resort in losses for your company. If you can’t eliminate downtime completely, you can certainly focus on doing the next best thing: limiting it as much as possible. When it comes to limiting downtime in the manufacturing industry, there are a few key things to keep in mind.
The Real Costs of Downtime in Manufacturing
In order for your company to fully grasp the importance of limiting downtime, first take a real look at how much it can cost. To find the estimated average cost that one hour of downtime is causing your organization, you need to take a look at factors like employee costs per hour, the fraction of employees affected, the average revenue per hour and the fraction of revenue being affected.
Let’s look at an example: say you manufacture a product with 100 employees, each employee makes $25 per hour and you produce $10,000/hour of product. Now, imagine your conveyor is down for 1 hour every week because of problems with the chain. When this happens, it affects 80 percent of the people on the line. Using the above formula, you would take the employee costs per hour ($2,500*.8) and add it to the average revenue per hour ($10,000) = $12,000/hr. Multiply this by 50 weeks in a year and you have lost out on $600,000.
Reducing Downtime of the Automated Paint System
Solutions like the finishing system that IntelliFinishing provides are focused on helping businesses limit downtime on conveyor systems. The IntelliFinishing solution alone decreases the typical amount of unscheduled and scheduled downtime by using technology approved by the automotive industry which typically requires a 99% up-time.
With traditional conveyance, like power and free, the chain and take-up and moving mechanical parts such as stops and pushers are frequently the cause of downtime. IntelliFinishing’s conveyance has eliminated these items because it has NO chain, therefore eliminating this point of failure.
No more chain elongation causing a jam at the take-up. No more problems backing up a conveyor since our conveyor is capable of moving backwards. No more chain results in much less downtime.
