The Human Contribution to Machine Downtime

Unplanned downtime is the biggest source of potential productivity loss for any manufacturing company. When equipment breaks down, production grinds to a stop, and products can’t be made. It is estimated that almost every factory loses at least 5% of productivity, with some factories experiencing as much as a 20% productivity loss due to unplanned downtime.

When OEE was first introduced, its creator, Seiichi Nakajima, believed that unreliable machines posed the greatest danger to productivity and that human operators were essentially cogs to maintain those unreliable machines.

In the last 20 years, machines have become 20 times more reliable. The source of machine breakdown has changed from unreliable machines to issues caused by human operator error. With increasingly complex machinery and production lines, traditional training methods—like paper manuals and binders—are no longer sufficient. Companies must optimize the human contribution to machine uptime to stay competitive.

In this article, we’ll explain the cost of unplanned downtime, the market trends that make it more difficult to solve and how Front Line Worker Platforms can help bridge the gap between a less experienced workforce and more advanced manufacturing environments by providing complex work instructions to simplify job execution, providing real-time data analytics, remote support and improved operational visibility. But first, let’s measure the cost of unplanned downtime to your company.

The Cost of Unplanned Downtime

There are two separate kinds of costs you must take into account when equipment breaks down. First, there is the cost of resources and raw materials to repair the broken equipment. A single breakdown in mining can cost 3,000 dollars an hour for repairs and lasts 60 hours on average. So that means that for repairs alone the average equipment failure costs $180,000. This is, in fact, the lesser of the two costs associated with machine breakdown.

The larger loss is in potential revenue. For this same mining equipment breakdown potential revenue loss averages out to $130,000 per hour and adds up to 7.8 million in lost revenue. It’s even worse in Oil and Gas, with the average breakdown costing $220,000 per hour. It makes sense that companies are putting a tremendous expenditure behind their preventive maintenance efforts to keep machines up and running.

Why You Have To Tackle This Problem Now

The problems that imperil productivity and contribute to machine downtime aren’t going away. The retirement of almost half of skilled workers has created a skilled worker shortage that is forecasted to continue into the 2030s.

This, coupled with increasing supply chain disruptions, rising commodity prices, growing sustainability concerns and a competitive marketplace, make increased operational efficiency a necessity.

You’re left with a situation where less skilled workers have to be more efficient than their predecessors in a more complicated work environment. You’re left with a workforce where operator error is more likely and will cause greater damage to your company’s ability to succeed in a more competitive marketplace. So how do you solve this problem?

The only way to meet this challenge is to mature your processes so that training and work instructions are so simple and intuitive that years of experience are unnecessary to operate complicated machinery. In other words, companies must make years of experience an unnecessary requirement for skilled workers.

To do this, you have to connect your workers to advanced instructions for training, job execution and remote support for emergency problem resolution. This is where Connected Worker or Front Line Worker Platforms come into the picture.

How Connected Worker Platforms Simplify Complex Work Environments

One of the biggest trends for leading manufacturers is the adoption of Connected Worker Platforms to optimize the human contribution to machine downtime. But what is a Connected Worker or Front Line Worker Platform?

Front Line Worker platforms integrate human workers into their environments using the devices they naturally use in the flow of work (laptops, tablets, mobile phones and Smart Glasses.) Front-line workers are connected to visual, highly contextual training, standardized work instructions and given instant access to remote assistance from subject matter experts when the unforeseen occurs.

These digital platforms dramatically reduce paperwork for reporting by digitizing processes, capture high-quality, actionable data, and allow manufacturers to continually improve their training and work instructions to meet and exceed the company’s standards for operational excellence. Let's talk about how Atheer, a leading Front-line worker platform, can help your workers beat the skills gap and improve operational efficiency. 

But how can Atheer’s AR Powered Front Line Worker Platform help contribute to your company’s success? Buckle up. We’re about to take a look.

How Atheer Can Help Your Business Reduce Machine Downtime

Atheer’s AR Connected Worker Platform helps optimize the human element of machine maintenance to increase machine uptime through:

1. Easy to understand visually rich, highly contextual training
2. Reducing human error with intuitive, standardized work instructions
3. Stopping problems before they cascade with real-time, actionable, preventive maintenance data
4. Streamlining communications and increasing operational visibility and traceability
5. Making it easy to escalate issues and solve rapidly with advanced photo editing and chat integrations
6. Capturing tribal knowledge before it walks out the door
7. Creating portable solutions created by experts to issues and makes them available to your entire organization
8. Offering best-in-class augmented reality-powered Remote Assistance to speed problem resolution time when the unforeseen occurs

1. Set The Standard For Execution

Atheer ensures that experienced, new, and even contract employees can do machine maintenance right the first time, no matter their experience level, with standardized digital workflows. Atheer’s workflows feature intuitive step-specific visual instruction, including videos, pictures, and diagrams. Human error is responsible for a large portion of unplanned downtime.

Written instructions are a massive part of the problem, as they can be easily misinterpreted and don’t cater to your workers' unique educational experiences. A picture or video is worth a thousand words, as they can show a front-line worker exactly how to complete a process without any room for misunderstanding. You set high standards for your employees, and Atheer makes it easy for them to adhere to those standards.

2. Enforce the High Standard

Atheer creates high-quality job completion verification by demanding pictures or videos to prove step completion for machine maintenance. Each step is time-stamped. Supervisors can verify that the job was done correctly before closing the task. This detail-oriented approach reduces human error by raising the standard for job completion and elevating traceability.

3. Rapidly Escalate Photographic Evidence For Quick Resolution

Workers can annotate directly on the photograph of a machine to highlight issues that need to be dealt with immediately. This can be quickly escalated to management to order preventive maintenance measures.

4. Improve Quality of PM Data

Maintenance data is made available to managers in real time, decreasing the time between discovering a problem and its resolution. Real-time operational transparency gives managers a new, never-before-achieved visibility into operations, so they know where problems are occurring and have the communication tools they need to immediately act on solutions.

5. Expertise at Scale

Atheer can connect front-line teams to subject matter experts located anywhere in the world for remote assistance to immediately solve issues, eliminating travel time and radically reducing machine downtime. This allows you to scale expertise across your organization.

6. Make Sure Preventive Maintenance Is Done

There shouldn’t be a question of whether preventive maintenance has been done. But with paper-based preventive maintenance, data is unavailable in real time, ends up siloed in computer systems, and often is skipped entirely. Atheer makes sure that preventive work maintenance gets completed and done to spec using our digital workflows and automated system. If PM gets skipped, it's flagged in our system, and Management can take immediate action. Regular preventive maintenance is an integral part of preventing unplanned downtime.

7. Elevate Machine Assembly, Disassembly and Inspection

Digital checklists make sure every step of an assembly, disassembly and inspection is done properly and all the paperwork is completed in real-time instead of over hours and days after a job is completed. Compliance can be integrated into the work flow. Proof of job completion is verified through photographs and videos.

With Atheer's restricted permission feature, you can even get a supervisor to check that everything is done properly before the job is closed. When the job is completed, an automatic report is generated and made available to relevant stakeholders. This eliminates hours of dual data entry for front-line workers and gets clients the reporting they need without delay.

Conclusion

The problems that threaten the human contribution to machine downtime will only grow in the future. Unskilled workers need to be armed with work instructions to simplify complicated work environments and reach the high standard of quality you demand for machine maintenance.

Atheer’s low-code/no-code platform is easy to implement, iterate, and redeploy. In the hour it takes to digitize a process, you can save front-line teams thousands of hours of dual data entry.

If you’re working in areas with zero connectivity, Atheer has created an offline job execution feature that makes sure all of your data is captured as soon as you go online with no data loss.

Your data with Atheer can be easily synced with your stack through simple, low-maintenance generic API-based integrations to update ERP, MES and BI systems in real-time in friendly file formats with no need for inconvenient data wrangling.

Ready to make everyone’s life in your company a lot easier and get your company ready for the future of advanced manufacturing? Book a demo here.