Everyone in your plant can describe last quarter’s big breakdown. The date, the failure, the recovery, who was called in. It generated meetings, a root cause report, and possibly a capital request.
Almost nobody can describe the two minute stop that happens twelve times a shift, every shift, and has for two years. It has generated nothing at all, because it has never been recorded.
On most constraint assets, the second one costs more.
Where 1,750 hours actually go
Our packaging line gives away $10.5mm a year. At $6,000 per constraint hour, that is 1,750 hours. Here is a representative split:
| Category | Hours | Value |
| Unplanned stops and breakdowns | 620 | $3.72mm |
| Running below design rate | 430 | $2.58mm |
| Changeover and startup | 350 | $2.10mm |
| Minor stops and short interruptions | 260 | $1.56mm |
| Rework, scrap, and quality holds | 90 | $0.54mm |
Look at rows two and four. Rate loss and minor stops together are 690 hours and over $4mm, and neither one typically appears anywhere in a standard downtime report.
Why the reporting system misses them
Your downtime system is not broken. It was designed to explain breakdowns, and it does that competently. It was never designed to price capacity, which is a different job.
Thresholds. Most systems only capture stops above a threshold, often ten or fifteen minutes. Everything below that is invisible by design. Twelve two minute stops per shift is twenty four minutes a shift, roughly 120 hours a year on a two shift operation, and none of it exists in your data.
Work order dependency. Events with a work order attached get recorded well. Events cleared by the operator in ninety seconds do not generate a work order and therefore do not generate a record.
Operator time. Coding a stop takes time the operator does not have during a run. What gets coded is what there was time to code, which biases the data toward long stops and quiet periods.
Stale reason codes. The category list was built years ago for a different product, a different package format, or a different line configuration. Operators pick the closest available option, which is frequently other.
Rate is never alarmed. This is the big one. A line running at 480 bags per hour against a 600 design rate is running. Product is shipping, nothing is stopped, and no alarm has fired. There is nothing in the system that treats it as a loss, and yet it is 20 percent of the asset’s capacity.
Why this matters more than the total
You already have a total. You calculated it two weeks ago and it is probably right.
What you do not have is an address. A total tells you the size of the problem. A split tells you where to act, and it is the split that determines whether the money you eventually get funded actually recovers anything.
Act on the wrong category and you will spend a real budget, generate real activity, and move the number very little. That outcome is the reason executives are skeptical of the next improvement proposal, and it is entirely avoidable.
What you cannot outsource
You can buy the total. Several tools, including ours, will estimate a hidden margin figure from data you already have.
The split has to come from your asset. Every plant’s profile is different, and the difference is the entire point. If your minor stops turn out to be trivial and your changeover losses are enormous, that changes the action, the budget, and the owner.
Two weeks of deliberate counting on one asset produces that. Nothing else does.
