Downtime Costing-Attitudes in Swedish Manufacturing Industry

While the process industry, generally shows a high awareness on the financial implications of low availability, the manufacturing industry is still quite ignorant. The traditional setup of discrete item manufacturing systems has been fairly forgiving of low availability. However, by applying lean principles, the discrete item production system resembles process industry, regarding sensitivity to disturbances. Still, the awareness of the financial impact of downtime seems to be low in manufacturing industry. This is a problem since it makes it harder to justify costs for investments in increased availability. This paper presents a study of the view and attitudes towards the cost of downtime in Swedish manufacturing industry. The answers indicate that the respondents have rather vague ideas of the costs associated with downtime. Further, they rarely quantify the downtime costs that often associated with maintenance of production equipment. However, without any proper financial measures for downtime costs, the companies lack proper incentives for investing time and resources on the necessary optimization of their maintenance programs.