The 8 usual suspects
- Waiting for material or blanks. The operator is busy elsewhere or the next batch has not arrived.
- Setup and changeover. Fixtures, offsets, first part. Often the single largest planned stop.
- Tool changes and tool wear. A worn tool means a stop, a scrap part, or both.
- Program not ready. Waiting for a program, a revision or an approval.
- Waiting for inspection. The first-article or in-process check holds the machine.
- Breakdowns and alarms. Planned maintenance that is skipped becomes unplanned downtime later.
- No operator. One person running several machines, shift handover, breaks.
- No load. No order to run. This one is a planning problem, not a machine problem.
Why it stays hidden
Short stops of two or three minutes do not feel like downtime, yet twenty of them in a shift is an hour. A paper log cannot catch them. The machine itself knows when it stopped; what it does not know is why, so the reason has to be captured at the moment of the stop.
What to track first
- Run, idle and stopped time for every machine, every shift.
- A short list of reason codes the operator can select in a second: material, setup, tool, program, inspection, breakdown, no operator, no load.
- Ranked lost minutes by reason, per machine and per line. Fix the top bar first.
- Cycle time against target, to catch slow running that never shows as a stop.
Start with the machines you already have
Machine signals can usually be read from the controller you own, old or new, without replacing the machine. See how it works on the Solution page, or estimate the value of the idle time on your floor.