Planned downtime is scheduled time when production equipment is limited or shut down to allow for planned maintenance (opens in new tab), repairs, upgrades or testing.
Planned downtime for maintenance is particularly important for keeping critical assets healthy, but it can also be used to reduce excessive maintenance on less vital equipment.
Every piece of equipment needs maintenance at some point, but it can be hard to shut down production assets when you have quotas to meet and machines seem to be operating without a problem. The reality is, planned downtime needs to happen, even if it seems like everything is already working properly.
While planned downtime and scheduled downtime are often used interchangeably, there are subtle, but key differences between them.
Planned downtime is all about creating a strategy for future work. It determines what tasks will be done and how.
Let’s say you know that a motor needs to be shut down and lubricated every 100 hours. You can plan for this downtime in many ways, from setting up an alert when the motor has run for 100 hours, to making sure the right lubrication is on hand, and creating a task list for the job. This is planned downtime.
Scheduled downtime is about deciding when downtime will happen and who oversees it. It’s when an issue or task is identified, given a deadline for completion, and assigned to a technician. Scheduled downtime can be planned or unplanned.
Let’s say a machine’s fan suddenly fails, halting production. You didn’t expect this to happen and you don’t have any of the spare parts on hand to fix it. However, you can schedule your top technician to repair the fan tomorrow. In this scenario, the downtime wasn’t planned for, but it did get scheduled.
Different maintenance strategies are linked to planned downtime and scheduled downtime:
Being able to plan downtime impacts every part of your maintenance operation, including helping you control costs, reduce downtime, eliminate inefficiencies, and more.
Maintenance isn’t always easy to schedule, especially for organizations that don’t have maintenance staff working on a 24/7 production cycle. But that little bit of extra effort is worth huge gains. As more planned downtime is scheduled, reactive (or run-to-failure) maintenance will decrease. In the end, reliability and productivity will increase.
Leverage the cloud to work together, better in the new connected age of maintenance and asset management.