Unscheduled downtime is the nightmare scenario for maintenance professionals and reflects a delicate balance between cost and efficiency. Organisations are deploying various strategies in a bid to tackle it, including outsourcing elements to specialists.
One of the biggest issues for any maintenance professional is that of unscheduled downtime, which can not only see repairs becoming more expensive but also stop entire production lines.
According to the 2024 Maintenance Engineering Report, produced by RS in partnership with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), organisations spend an average of 15 hours a week wrestling with this – down from 20 hours the previous year – with the average hourly cost standing at £5,471.95.
“The biggest problem with unscheduled downtime is the variability it brings into your production schedules,” says Richard Jeffers, Solutions and Technical Director at RS.
“If you’re looking at raw materials coming in or deliveries going out on a schedule – particularly in food and beverage, where you’re tied into slots, typically with the supermarkets – that variability of supply hits the planning team and the downstream supply chain. It’s a massive issue if you work in the world of manufacturing, or indeed any industrial asset.”
Jamie Hughes, Plant Manager at life sciences business Ecolab, says his business has a relatively mature maintenance programme and understands what’s required to keep equipment running, so it doesn’t suffer too much from unscheduled downtime. “But we do have quite an aged asset profile,” he says.
“We’re fortunate enough to be down every weekend, so we do our maintenance then. There’s a cost element to that, but the net result is we have a reasonably good operational performance of the equipment.” The business is currently moving towards a predictive maintenance strategy, he adds, but this has proved a slow process.
Balancing the costs of proactivity
But organisations must balance the impact of downtime against the cost of implementing a more proactive strategy, says Jeffers. “It’s very difficult to put an exact value on the cost of downtime,” he says. “If your beer packaging line goes down in December, it costs you a fortune because everybody wants to buy beer for Christmas. If it goes down in January, when everybody has stopped drinking, then it doesn’t matter as much.
“Having an acceptable level that your business buys into is critically important because preventative maintenance is like a form of insurance. If the cost of the maintenance is more than the cost of failure, then you shouldn’t do the preventative maintenance. You should just wait for it to fail and repair – so reactive maintenance.” This kind of approach can help determine other elements, such as frequency of condition monitoring, he adds.
The main causes of downtime are ageing assets (29%), mechanical failure (21%) and the lead time to get hold of products (12%). Organisations are attempting to tackle this in various ways, with the most common being upgrading equipment (49%).
The same percentage of organisations (49%) are focusing on improving staff training, up from 38 per cent the year before. A focus here, says Lydia Amarquaye, Education and Skills Policy Lead at IMechE, is on interpreting information that is now available on downtime and the potential causes. “Those analytical skills are something that a lot of industries are talking about now,” she says.
“Engineers need critical-thinking skills as well as the tools to do that analysis, whether that’s through AI or using programming to aid understanding. That can help with understanding if the schedule for maintenance is still relevant, or if they need to shorten or lengthen the time between checks. Some of it can be intuitive but understanding how to analyse all that to make the right decisions, at the right time, is still important.”
Reducing the risks
Another aspect of reducing downtime is to ensure the quality and provenance of components – something that’s even more important with the growth of counterfeit products, and in an age when the threat from cyberattacks is all too real. “If you’re buying a component, you want to understand the provenance of that,” says Jeffers.
“Most factories are computer-controlled in some way, so you need to make sure those devices you’re connecting to your factory have been properly penetration-tested. You don’t want to plug in some random bit of technology that opens you up to an attack. The same can apply to mechanical components; if you’re buying a bearing, you need to know that it’s a high-quality bearing from a reputable vendor.”
Procurement functions are increasingly becoming involved in the purchase of items, with one in three companies (33%) saying the function is now highly active in agreeing supplier requirements – up from 23 per cent the previous year – and 41 per cent saying it’s involved to a medium degree. The most important factor when selecting a supplier is the ability to deliver (23%), followed by quality assurance and responsiveness (both 18%).
One option for organisations is to outsource elements of their maintenance, and the proportion of companies doing this has risen from 63 to 71 per cent. The most common reason for this is that there are too many specialist skills required to undertake such activity in-house (54%), with 38 per cent highlighting reduced headcount as a factor and a third (33%) a lack of skills among existing staff.
“Typically, companies would outsource something because it’s a specialist skill that they don’t wish to retain in-house,” says Jeffers. “Almost everybody outsources their high-voltage maintenance because very few people are qualified to maintain that. But you might outsource because you’ve got peaks and troughs in demand, or because it’s cheaper, although that’s rarely the case in the maintenance environment.”
For more insight and opinion on the 2024 Maintenance Engineering Report, click here.
