Five production mistakes you could fix today to reduce your machine downtime

Looking at the data from our Q2 Downtime Reason Report, we’ve come up with 5 top tips to reduce your downtime.

1. Letting machines run without proper servicing

According to our report, reducing machine breakdown could have saved our customers 200 hours of downtime in the 6 months up to August 2024.

Machine breakdown can be caused by a wide range of issues, but primarily good care of your machine tool is hugely important to preventing machine breakdown.

2. Not saving fixture information for repeat jobs

Machine setups take a lot of the time out of production for our customers. Some of this is due to repeat jobs that have custom fixturing but don’t come about so much that there’s an SOP.

One rule that would mitigate an issue like this is to document everything. Every remotely complex setup could be documented into an SOP and stored in an easy-to-find fashion. Doing this could save hours looking for fixturing and wondering what’s missing from it.

3. Running a shift with the wrong person-machine ratio

Working on another machine is one reason some machines are not being productive. With the right skills and training and a good work schedule that matches long and short running jobs together for an operator, a much better uptime can be achieved so machines aren’t waiting for people to set them.

4. Having too little skilled staff on hand

No operators available is becoming an increasing reason for downtime in customers around the UK. Investing in staff is imporant for businesses to attract talent and maintain high rates of productivity and component quality.

Without cross-functional trained staff available, expensive assets like machine tools are left idle costing the company money.

5. No work available for a machine

If there’s no work available for a machine, this could be a sign of many things. Short-term factors such as the kinds of production requirements from work orders this month might not require a specific machine may change from month to month. Longer term factors such as industry demand or economic recession might reduce the number of jobs won by your company.

If production requirements change so drastically from month to month such that some machines are not required, consider consolidating the machine shop into fewer but more versatile multi-tasking machines.

Instead when longer term trends are affecting your business, there might be other sources of work from outside your focussed sector available. Consider investing in Nuclear or Aerospace accreditation to be able to work with a wider variety of customers.