The Best Strategies for Reducing and Mitigating Downtime

You strive to make your manufacturing business as profitable as possible. You want to keep costs down, keep productivity high, and ultimately generate more revenue than you spend on expenses.

But there is a lurking variable that can throw your entire profitability equation into chaos: downtime. If your business has too much downtime, or if that downtime is sufficiently disruptive, it can prevent you from being able to achieve your business goals.

So what are the best strategies for reducing and mitigating downtime?

The Impact of Downtime

For starters, let’s look at just how disruptive downtime can be. Depending on the nature of your organization, it’s likely that your productive output is directly tied to your ability to keep your manufacturing processes moving. For example, let’s say you make $1 of profit for each product you make, and your factory can make 100,000 products an hour. Most equations are much more complicated than this, but we’ll keep this example simple for the sake of illustrating the point.

If you’re a manufacturing facility in this hypothetical and offline for even half an hour, it’s going to cost you $50,000. If you can get things up and running just 15 minutes faster, you’ll save $25,000. And if you can prevent this and future, similar incidents from occurring, you could save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Employing even a handful of effective strategies for reducing and mitigating downtime can save your business a lot of money, and help it succeed in the long term.

Secure the Right Equipment and Components

One of the best strategies for mitigating downtime is securing the right equipment and components. With better, more reliable equipment, you won’t have to worry as much about unexpected interruptions or mechanical failures. Purchasing the right components, too, can make sure that your equipment stays up and running and that your industrial processes can be followed precisely. Do your due diligence to make sure you’re purchasing better material items from more reliable manufacturers.

Understand Your Operation at the Highest Level

Sometimes, it’s helpful to zoom out and view your operation at the highest possible level. When managing downtime, it’s sometimes tempting to become very granular in your vision, but you also need to be able to understand how your facility operates at higher scales. How do different processes and departments interact with each other? What are the biggest points of vulnerability and how can you protect them?

Appoint Better Leaders

No matter what, you should have some kind of point person in charge of reducing and mitigating downtime. It might be an operational manager, supervisor, or some other leadership position, but it needs to be someone who is well-versed in strategically managing downtime. With a better leader in place, it will become much easier to develop a viable strategy.

Conduct Thorough Checks and Inspections

You can also reduce downtime with thorough checks and balances. The more people you have holding your business and its employees accountable, the less likely it is for something to slip through the cracks.

Pay especially close attention to:

• Consistency. Your processes need to be consistent and thorough if you want them to succeed. It’s not enough to impulsively or occasionally address matters of productivity and downtime.
• Documentation. Ideally, you’ll document every aspect of your downtime prevention and mitigation strategy. This way, you’ll be able to practice with greater transparency and you’ll have an easier time training new people.
• Cost benefit analysis. For each change in your system, conduct a cost benefit analysis. How much will this new piece of the puzzle cost you, and how much downtime could it spare you?

Implement Backup Solutions

Backups are the lifeblood of your operational integrity. Make sure there’s plenty of redundancy built into your business.

Have an Emergency Response Plan

You can’t afford to blindly hope that your business will never suffer downtime. Instead, you need to have a proactive plan for how you’re going to mitigate downtime when it unfolds. What is your emergency response plan? Who is in charge of it? And how are you going to implement it?

Use Root Cause Analysis

Downtime prevention is essentially a function of risk mitigation. Even with hypothetically perfect systems in play, it’s possible for incidents to still occur. If and when they do occur, conduct a root cause analysis so you can better understand why they happened – and stop similar incidents in the future.

Keep Adapting

Finally, keep adapting. There are always new things to learn, there are always new downtime prevention measures to study, and there are always internal processes that can be improved.

With a more refined approach to preventing and mitigating downtime, your organization can run much more smoothly and productively. It takes time and effort to get to this point, but it’s well worth the investment.