by Emily Newton
Manufacturing uptime measures a facility’s active operational time compared to its scheduled operational time. Knowing how to calculate uptime and increase it is key to running a successful production plant while maintaining the current customer base and attracting new clients.
Knowing how to calculate uptime and increase it are key parts to running a successful production plant while maintaining the current customer base and attracting new clients. What are some of the best long-term strategies to maximize uptime in an automated manufacturing environment?
1. Build a Digital Twin
Digital twins are highly realistic digitized versions of real-life assets. People may have digital twins for specific critical equipment or those representing entire factories. They can then work within the digital twin to manipulate factors that may increase or decrease manufacturing uptime. A primary benefit of the digital twin is that it creates a test environment for people to try various strategies without adversely affecting the manufacturing plant.
One commercially available digital twin reflects the real-time status of every machine in a facility. That consolidated and accurate information allows people to act quickly, spotting and addressing issues that could otherwise compromise manufacturing uptime.
Industrial executives also increasingly realize digital twins are important for their future growth. One survey found 86% of respondents believed digital twins applied to their operational needs. Additionally, 44% of those polled had already begun using them, and another 15% planned to do so.
Those statistics suggest people who don’t seriously consider using digital twins — whether to increase uptime or achieve other gains — may need to catch up with peers who adopted the technology earlier.
Manufacturing leaders will also get the best results when they get specific about what they hope to accomplish with digital twins. For example, do their uptime goals relate to a particular machine, assembly line or product or are they even broader? Determining that as early as possible is an excellent way to maintain focus and work towards challenging but reachable goals.
2. Learn How to Calculate Uptime and Identify Problems
People must also learn how to calculate uptime as a long-term strategy for maintaining or improving it. Uptime is the amount of functional time across the manufacturing period. If your factory had a 16-hour workday with one hour of downtime, the facility achieved 15 hours of uptime.
However, you should also learn how to calculate uptime as it relates to overall availability. Do that by dividing the uptime by the total operating hours the manufacturing facility has in a given period. Finally, multiply that result by 100. You’ll end up with the uptime percentage.
It gives you an excellent benchmark for understanding whether the uptime has improved or worsened over time. Has the amount of automation used in the plant changed the uptime?
Once you learn how to calculate uptime, scrutinize your plant’s statistics and see if you notice any trends. For example, is downtime more common during particular shifts or times of the year? Do specific machines fail more frequently than others? These answers will differ according to what your manufacturing facility produces, which assets it has and how many team members work across various shifts or departments at the manufacturing facility.
Finding the patterns will help you notice which aspects of manufacturing uptime are within or outside your control. It’s then easier for leadership members to decide which areas deserve their focus first.
3. Commit to Regular Employee Training
Even when companies have long-term strategies for increasing manufacturing uptime, that doesn’t necessarily mean most workers will be at the facility through the years. Some estimates suggest employee turnover in some manufacturing facilities reached nearly 40% and stayed that high for several years. Then, it only takes a couple of years for new workers to replace those who formerly held lead roles in their plants.
Manufacturing leaders should take a multipronged approach to reducing turnover rates. Some avenues to explore include:
- Offering competitive salaries
- Maintaining a safe work environment
- Providing career advancement opportunities
- Emphasizing a work-life balance
However, it’s also important to train employees to use equipment properly and reduce the chance of downtime. Unaddressed worker errors could immediately break equipment or shorten its lifespan.
However, when employees are well-trained and can use the equipment competently, there’s a much lower chance of such downtime happening. The education should also detail the processes for people to follow when checking for and reporting errors.
The general approach is for employees to follow checklists before and after using equipment. If they notice anything amiss while doing that, they must then know which steps to take to report abnormalities properly. For example, is there a particular form to complete? Should a person notify their immediate supervisor?
When a company has a clear and well-established process, people should not assume someone else must have already reported an issue or that they will. Instead, the first parties to discover issues will feel confident in alerting the correct individuals.
4. Increase Manufacturing Uptime With an Appropriate Maintenance Strategy
Since unplanned machine failures can cause significant downtime, people should select proactive maintenance strategies. Those increase the likelihood of technicians detecting issues before they disrupt operations.
Condition-based maintenance is a popular strategy that uses connected sensors to gather information about a machine’s state in real time. It’s a far more customized approach than those that recommend people perform specific maintenance tasks after a particular number of machine operating hours or other metrics. That method is usually too broad since it doesn’t account for details associated with individual manufacturing plants or processes.
There’s also predictive maintenance, which goes even further to catch issues and give machine operators plenty of warning. It uses sensors to measure data over time, flagging potential issues and allowing companies to maintain manufacturing uptime.
Consider an example where a machine begins gradually vibrating more than usual. It could operate that way for many more months and never cause quality or operational problems. But, the longer the excessive vibration continues, the higher the chance of an unexpected outage. Predictive maintenance tools could warn people about the vibration, giving them ample time to address the matter, whether ordering a part, scheduling a maintenance appointment or taking another decisive action.
