Unplanned Downtime
Unplanned downtime is time a process or line is stopped unexpectedly due to equipment failure or faults. It is one of the largest hidden costs in manufacturing — lost production, restart costs and quality losses — and the main target of predictive maintenance.
Unlike planned maintenance windows, unplanned downtime strikes without warning and is expensive: lost throughput, scrap from restarts, overtime and missed orders. Quantifying the true cost per hour of downtime is the foundation of any predictive-maintenance business case, because it sets the value of avoiding a single failure.
Related terms
Predictive Maintenance (PdM) · OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) · MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) · MTTR (Mean Time To Repair)