Downtime Root Cause Analysis

Find the true cause of downtime and improve equipment availability

For plants looking to become leaner and improve their Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), we often find that Equipment Availability is their largest loss and the biggest contributor to a low OEE.

The problem with tracking Availability and OEE by themselves is that both these measurements are a lagging indicator. You will get good initial gains by making your team aware of the issues that are occurring and tracking how this affects your plant’s overall performance. However, to get your operations to the next level you will need to move from being reactive to proactive. This means moving to a Rapid Response model where everyone on the team is aware of downtime issues, what is being done to fix them, and involved in long-term root causing and resolution.

Increase Availability

Increase your Operation’s Availability by finding the true root causes of Downtime, determining whether the Downtime is caused by Equipment Issues or Material Handling issues, setting up alerts to draw attention and problem solving to stoppages in real time, and tracking Downtime and its associated KPIs week-over-week and month-over-month to measure your improvement efforts.

Start Tracking Downtime and Reasons Directly From Equipment

MAJiK’s IIoT Connect software can capture Warnings and Fault Codes directly from your equipment. We have to work with what is available on your automation control, but in many cases this can be a rich set of data related to the problems that your equipment experiences during running. This can be mapped to Downtime Reasons you want to track in MAJiK’s Visual Factory software.

Allow Operators and Supervisors to add context and observations

Fault codes from equipment don’t contain the whole story. Often operators and supervisors are able to add additional comments and context that would not be available from just tracking signals on machinery. Determine what information you want from your team, and the system can automatically kick off work flows to require additional operator input for certain types of Faults.

Distinguish between Material Issues, Unplanned Downtimes, and Planned Downtimes

An important step in improving your Equipment Availability is to determine what type of Downtime is impacting it most. Equipment can be Starved of Raw Materials or be Blocked by a downstream process. Once known, these type of issues can be quickly fixed by better material handling policies. Unplanned mechanical downtimes can be tackled by Total Productive Maintenance policies and detailed tracking. Planned downtimes such as Machine Changeovers, Shift Changes, Cleaning, and Breaks are a necessary part of your operation, however it is important to track them and be notified if they are running too long.

Alert appropriate Team Members when a Downtime requiring their input occurs

Some Downtimes need to be escalated to certain Maintenance Team Members or other specialists in the facility to be root caused and fixed. Give operators and supervisors the ability to inform these team members directly while providing them with the full history of the Downtime.

Escalate Downtimes up your reporting chain

If Downtime runs too long, or there are too many occurrences over a period of time, set up automatic escalations so your Plant Manager and Executive team are also notified. Don’t be caught by surprise at the end of a shift.

Track Total Downtime as well as Number of Occurrences, Mean Time Between Failure, and Mean Time to Repair

Measuring long term trends of your downtime is important to know whether your team’s work is creating the improvement that you desire. Review and compare Downtime week-over-week and month-over-month. Compare important downtime metrics such as MTTR and MTBF across downtime type, equipment type, and across your facility.

 
To move from a reactive downtime response model to a proactive downtime response model, you need to implement a Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) rapid response framework.

To move from a reactive downtime response model to a proactive downtime response model, you need to implement a Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) rapid response framework.