Business Acumen: The 11 Equipment Losses

The 11 Equipment Losses 

The machines are talking. Most plants only hear the loudest one. 

In the last post we named the three families of loss. Now we go into the first and most familiar one: the 11 ways your equipment quietly hands money back. Familiar is the trap here. Most plants chase the loud, visible losses and walk right past the bigger, quieter ones. By the end of this post you’ll know all eleven by name, and you’ll know which ones are probably costing you the most. 

The 11 equipment losses split into two groups: four are scheduled, and seven are unplanned. Both cost money. The scheduled ones are necessary, but necessary is not the same as efficient. 

The four scheduled losses 

These are the planned reasons you take a line down. You can’t eliminate them, but you can absolutely tighten them. 

1. Scheduled Maintenance Time. Planned downtime for PMs, lubrication routes, inspections, and calibrations. The loss isn’t the PM; it’s the slop around it. A four-hour PM that runs six because parts weren’t staged just bled you two hours for nothing. 

1. Scheduled Engineering Time. Planned downtime for installs, upgrades, and line modifications. A poorly scoped install that creeps from two days to five delays your return to production and burns labor the whole time. 

1. Scheduled Operations Time. Planned downtime for inventory counts, training, cleanings, and audits. Stretching a two-hour training into a lost six-hour shift because nothing else was organized around it is pure waste. 

1. Lack of Demand. The line isn’t scheduled because there are no orders. That’s not the plant’s fault, but the fixed-cost meter still runs during idle hours. Using that time well, for extra PMs, training, or projects, is the plant’s opportunity. 

Real-world example: the PM that ran long. A four-hour planned PM on a packaging line took seven hours. The wrong gasket was kitted, costing 30 minutes to source the right one. Two technicians showed up without the right calibration tool, costing 45 minutes. Startup defects after restart threw away 90 minutes of product. The PM itself was fine. The planning around it was not. That extra three hours cost about $9,000 in lost contribution, and a 30-minute pre-PM kitting check would have prevented most of it. 

The seven big losses 

These are the seven unplanned losses you have the most control over, and they’re the ones that move OEE the most. This is where most reliability programs focus, and rightly so. 

1. Setup and Adjustments. Deviation from a set standard of time. For example, a scheduled 30-minute changeover takes 45 minutes. The 15 minutes that was unplanned cost you units, equating to profit lost.  

1. Breakdowns. Unplanned stops of 10 minutes or more that need a part to fix. This is the most visible loss, which is exactly why it gets too much of the attention. A single major breakdown can wipe out a week of contribution margin on a critical line. 

1. Process Failures. Unplanned stops of 10 minutes or more that do not need a part: sensor faults, software glitches, control logic, operator confusion. These get missed because they don’t look like classic breakdowns, but they burn just as much time and often force a quality check on whatever ran before the stop. 

1. Speed Losses. The gap between design speed and actual run speed. This is the most insidious loss in the building. A line built for 100 units a minute that runs at 80 has lost 20% of its capacity, and not one minute of it shows up on a downtime sheet. 

1. Minor Stops. Stops under 10 minutes. Death by a thousand cuts. Two hundred short stops of three minutes each add up to 10 hours of downtime a week, invisible on the dashboard because no single event is big enough to notice. 

1. Startup Defects. Defective product made during warm-up after a stop or changeover. Most plants accept this as “just how it is.” It isn’t. Reducing startup waste is one of the highest-return quality plays available. 

1. In-Process Defects. Defective product made during normal running. This is a direct hit to material and labor cost, because a defective unit carries the full cost of being produced and generates exactly zero revenue. 

Real-world example: the minor stops nobody sees. On a frozen-meal packaging line, the operator hits reset about 100 times a shift to clear minor jams from a tray feeder. Each reset takes 90 seconds. That’s 150 minutes per shift, two and a half hours of downtime, every shift, never logged because each event is under 10 minutes. At $4,200 an hour in lost contribution, that’s $10,500 per shift, or about $7.5M a year across three shifts. The fix was a $14,000 redesign of the tray-feed transfer. Payback: less than one day. 

Read those two examples back-to-back and you can see the lesson. The loud loss, the breakdown, gets a war room. The quiet loss, 90 seconds at a time, gets a $7.5M annual bill and no attention at all. 

Try it yourself 

Walk one of your lines for 30 minutes during normal running. Tally three things: 

• Every time the line stops or hesitates. 

• Whether each stop was over or under 10 minutes. 

• Whether anyone wrote it down. 

Then ask how much of what you just watched is actually making it into your reported OEE. The gap between what you saw and what got recorded is your minor-stops opportunity, and it’s usually a lot bigger than anyone expects. 

Key takeaways 

• Equipment losses split into 4 scheduled and 7 unplanned. The 7 unplanned are the ones that move OEE. 

• Speed losses and minor stops are the most under-counted, and often the largest. 

• Most plants over-focus on breakdowns because they’re visible. The bigger money usually hides in minor stops, speed, and quality losses. 

• If you can’t tell a Process Failure from a Breakdown, you can’t match the right strategy to the loss. 

 

Coming next, Part 2, Post 3: The 9 Human Efficiency Losses.