Guide hub
Downtime
Downtime is stopped production time, planned or not, and pricing it takes more than a stopwatch on the line. The guides below cover reason codes operators will actually use, a worked cost model for what an hour of downtime costs, the six big losses framework mapped to what monitoring actually sees, and shift comparison that surfaces the pattern.
30 guides
- 01 Andon Response Time: How Fast Is Fast Enough Call to acknowledge, acknowledge to fix, two different clocks. What targets shops actually hit for each, and how to set one that survives contact with a busy floor. →
- 02 How to Get Operators to Actually Code Stops Two taps, a list that fits on the screen, and one owner for the coding number. What gets a downtime reason picked instead of skipped. →
- 03 How to Verify a Fix Actually Held Before and after windows done right, the confounders that fake a win, and when it's fair to call an improvement zero instead of stretching to find one. →
- 04 Minor Stops: The Losses Nobody Logs The two minute stop that never makes it onto anyone's radar, why a plant needs thresholds instead of a human judgment call, and how the short stops add up past the breakdowns. →
- 05 MTTR and MTBF for a Plant Floor, in Plant Words What mean time to repair and mean time between failures actually measure, how much history makes them trustworthy, and what to do with a number built on too little of it. →
- 06 Planned vs Unplanned Downtime: The Line That Changes Every Number Where changeovers, PM windows, and breaks belong, and why moving that one line shifts your OEE, your Pareto, and your maintenance backlog all at once. →
- 07 Running a Kaizen Event Off Machine Data Instead of a Guess Pick the loss with a real dollar figure behind it, walk in with an evidence pack instead of a hunch, and measure the week after to know if it actually stuck. →
- 08 The Shift Handoff That Actually Sticks What the outgoing shift needs to write down, what the incoming shift needs to read first, and the five lines that matter more than a full report. →
- 09
9 min read
Downtime Reason Codes Operators Will Actually Use Fewer codes beat more codes. What a usable downtime reason list looks like per vertical, a policy for stops too short to ask about, and coding at shift end. → - 10
8 min read
Tracking What Machines Run Without Work Order Ceremony A lightweight way to tell a system what a machine is making without scheduling a full job. When paperwork earns its keep, and when it's just friction. → - 11
7 min read
Shift Comparison That Changes Behavior D, E, and N shift analysis done right. Same machines, same mix, or the comparison lies. What to do when nights actually run worse. → - 12
8 min read
Changeover Time You Can Actually Cut, Once You Stop Guessing at It Changeover is planned downtime, not a failure. How to measure it accurately, rank it by dollars, and the first three moves that actually shorten it. → - 13
8 min read
Dry Contacts and Stack Lights as Machine State A switch, a relay, a stack light segment, wired straight into the gateway's digital inputs. Debouncing a noisy contact, and what a bare on/off tells you. → - 14
8 min read
What Happens When the Internet Goes Down The gateway keeps polling and buffering locally, then backfills once the link returns. What the dashboard shows while a site is dark, and what's proven so far. → - 15
9 min read
How Much Does Downtime Actually Cost? A Worked Cost Model A downtime cost model a supervisor can redo on paper: lost throughput, labor paid to stand idle, expedite and overtime recovery, and why the sticker shock is usually accurate. → - 16
9 min read
The Six Big Losses, Mapped to What Modern Monitoring Actually Sees The classic TPM six big losses framework, checked against what a machine-connected system can actually detect automatically versus what still needs a human to say what happened. → - 17
9 min read
What a 30 Day Pilot Should Actually Prove Written success criteria before day one, the two things a pilot has to show on a real floor, and what to walk away from when it can't. → - 18
8 min read
The First Dollar Finding: What Week One Usually Turns Up What the first priced loss looks like once real data starts flowing, why it is usually a changeover or a minor stop instead of a big breakdown, and how to react to it. → - 19
8 min read
What to Show the Plant Manager in Week One The three screens worth putting in front of a plant manager after the first week of real data, the one number that matters most, and what to hold back until later. → - 20
9 min read
Machine Monitoring ROI: A Worked Example A twelve machine shop run through the loss and savings math on the ROI calculator's own assumptions: weekly losses, conservative savings, payback, and which two inputs actually move the answer. → - 21
8 min read
Why OEE Alone Does Not Change Behavior A percentage nobody owns versus a dollar figure someone does. Why OEE on its own rarely drives a fix, and what turns the same data into action. → - 22
8 min read
What Verified Savings Actually Means Before and after windows, attribution versus causation, and why a ledger that can show zero is worth more than one that can only show a win. → - 23
~8 min
Ask Your Factory: Twenty Questions a Plant Manager Asks, and What the Answer Cites Plain-language questions about downtime, quality, shifts, and money, answered from live data with the sources named. What it can answer, and what it says when it can't. → - 24
~8 min
How Spall Predicts a Failure: From the Machine's Own History, With the Count Behind It A failure-risk percentage built from a machine's own count of past breakdowns: MTBF, the odds of a failure this week, what it costs to be wrong, and when there isn't enough history to say. → - 25
~8 min
Alarm Sequences That Precede a Stop: How a Precursor Is Found and Turned Into a Trigger How Spall mines a machine's alarm history for codes that reliably fire before a downtime reason or a scrap event, and turns a real pattern into a one-click trigger. → - 26
~7 min
What the AI Needs From Your Plant: Data Readiness in a Week Which models come online in a day, which need a full week, and which take longer, mapped against what a floor actually has to do to get there. → - 27
~7 min
How to Read an Insight Card: Evidence, Confidence, and the Blank That Means Something Anatomy of an ML insight card: what the title claims, what the evidence backs it with, what the dollar figure means, and what a blank or a learning state is actually saying. → - 28
~8 min
From AI Finding to Verified Savings: The Loop That Proves It Linking an insight to the action taken opens a measurement window. What comes out the other side: verified, no change, or worse, priced only against a real rate, confounders named either way. → - 29
8 min read
Shift Attribution: Getting a Stop on the Right Shift How Spall decides which shift a stop or a part belongs to, why cross-midnight and rotating patterns trip it up, and what a wrong schedule does to every downstream number. → - 30
9 min read
The Preventive Maintenance Calendar the Data Keeps PM tasks on a real cadence, what overdue actually means, MTBF as the interval a task should run on, and how the calendar connects to the repair queue. →
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