Downtime is a word frowned upon by most everyone in manufacturing and distribution. It equates to the unnecessary costs we all know it to cause, and it can make even the most seasoned manufacturing management team cringe. 

When it comes to minimizing downtime and its effects in manufacturing, there are a few tried and trusted methods that have been working for many scenarios in the industry. Today, we’ll break down four of those methods and the reason that it still works for reducing the downtime numbers. 

Regular Preventative Maintenance

Preventative maintenance is much more than just lubing your conveyor rollers and ensuring that o-rings are changed out on your pumps. Preventative maintenance encompasses most everything from safety guards on equipment to complete machinery rebuilds, and for very good reason. The fact is, everything is preventative until something takes place that makes the time an active breakdown occurrence. 

By performing preventative maintenance on time, every single time, you’re ensuring that your equipment is up to manufacturer spec, and that there is no walking out of spec by the product that you’re manufacturing. Preventative maintenance keeps lost time breakdowns from taking place, and keeps everything humming along in your busy facility. 

CMMS is the key to ensuring that your maintenance schedule stays on track, your PM supplies are ordered, and your labor to get the tasks done is scheduled. A CMMS takes the guesswork out of managing the preventative maintenance in your facility, and simply streamlines all of the easily forgotten details, leaving you to focus on the critical matters in your facility. 

Upgrade Your Equipment

Even preventative maintenance can’t prevent machines from eventually outrunning their life span. We all want to squeeze every possible nickel out of our capital purchases. If there is any way possible to get another revolution out of that machine, we absolutely want to see it turn again. However, some outdated and aged machinery can be doing your facility more harm than good. 

By upgrading your equipment and using your capital funds wisely, you can ensure that you’ll get the maximum mileage out of your new equipment choices. Do your research, and be sure that you are purchasing for longevity, not just the latest group of bells and whistles. 

Interdepartmental Communication

If there is one thing that can really make a production manager think about changing career paths, it is looking out onto a manufacturing floor and seeing all of the lines at a standstill, and all of his employees doing the same. If you are experiencing emergency downtime anywhere in your facility, it is going to be felt, on some level, everywhere in your facility. That is the way manufacturing works, because typically all departments are, for the most part, interlinked. 

If you experience unexpected downtime at a palletizer, it won’t be long at all until all of the lines that feed into that palletizer are now backed up and sitting with nowhere to feed to. The best thing that can be done at the onset of that unexpected downtime is to convey to every department manager and departmental lead that you’ve now encountered a critical breakdown, and the line will be down for an unknown period, relaying your best estimate if you have one at that time. 

Remember it is absolutely vital to give updates as you have them, and that everyone is there for the same reason that you are; for the success of the facility. Maintenance is working just as hard to keep the facility on line and producing as manufacturing is working to pump the units out the door to the customer. It is a team effort, and one side can’t be successful without the assistance of the other side. Keep the teamwork mindset, and relay any critical information to the entire management team so that everyone can be abreast of the situation on the manufacturing floor. 

Crosstrain Employees

Employees standing around or taking three hour breaks due to a machine being offline is a bad idea all the way around. Not only is it costly in terms of unused labor hours, it’s just bad for morale. Nobody wants to return to work from a four hour midday break. 

Crosstrain your employees for more reasons than lending them to other departments during breakdowns. The fact is, some employees may have started in an entry level position with the hopes of moving to a different department. This happens in manufacturing facilities quite often, and it can often be beneficial to employees to spend time working in other departments to get a feel for the jobs available in that department. 

In addition, by lending out those unused labor hours during breakdowns, you not only keep the costs in the department down during emergency breakdowns, but it also shows where there is a need for greater labor force by keeping track of which department was able to use all of those employees that were suddenly just standing around with nothing to do. There is no easier way to justify a new hire than to show that your department used 4 filler department employees during downtime and managed to keep them all busy. The easiest justification in making your case for new hires is to present your case with the actual numbers.

By Talmage Wagstaff, Co-Founder and CEO of Redlist. He has degrees and extensive experience in civil, mechanical and industrial engineering. Talmage worked for several years as a field engineer with ExxonMobil servicing many of the largest industrial production facilities in the Country.