Dive Brief:
- Industrial operators are seeing less downtime than last year, but paying more due to these disruptions, according to a report from MaintainX released Wednesday.
- While 85.2% of respondents reported a stabilization or even a decrease in unplanned downtime incidents over the past year, 29.4% said there has been an increase in the financial impact of these disruptions despite fewer outages, according to a survey of 1,165 maintenance, repair and operations professionals. This year, the average cost of one hour of unplanned downtime hovers at around $25,000 and can soar to over half a million dollars for larger organizations, MaintainX says in its 2024 State of Industrial Maintenance report.
- Sixty-five percent of respondents said proactive maintenance is the most effective way to reduce unplanned downtime incidents. Although 86.8% of facilities reportedly use preventive maintenance strategies, almost 60% dedicate less than half of their total maintenance time to these strategies, highlighting a crucial area for improvement, MaintainX says.
Dive Insight:
MaintainX’s survey covered respondents from sectors like manufacturing, retail, hospitality and business, with 70% of organizations sampled having less than 100 employees. Fifty-four percent of respondents were maintenance professionals and 16% said they are in charge of general management and operations. The remaining proportion of respondents included those holding engineering, plant management, information technology and other job titles.
While a majority of respondents agreed that proactive maintenance is an evolving strategy to reduce unplanned downtime incidents, 43% noted that replacing aging equipment is an effective approach and 27% said improvements in the quality and frequency of training are a helpful measure.
Despite respondents’ emphasis on the importance of preventive maintenance strategies, 57% of facilities continue to rely on some form of run-to-failure maintenance to maintain their assets, the report says.
Facilities have been proactive in modernizing their assets in the past year, however, according to the report. In 2023, companies increased investments in plants and other production facilities by 63%, marking the largest annual increase since 1951, MaintainX says, attributing this surge to federal incentives and “a need to catch up on deferred spending due to supply chain disruptions.”
Among facilities that did see an increase in unplanned downtime in the past 12 months, 65.7% named labor shortages and a lack of necessary skill sets as the key drivers. “These findings underscore the importance of high-quality training and upskilling initiatives in combating skilled labor shortages and unplanned downtimes,” the report says.
More manufacturers reported increases in unplanned downtime incidents than facility managers, with 17.4% of manufacturers reporting such increases, compared with 13.6% of facility managers. the report says. Facility managers also tend to struggle more with aging equipment than equipment failure, per the report.
Meanwhile, the rising costs of unplanned downtime are largely due to rising costs of parts and shipping as well as increased labor costs, the report says. It notes that improving maintenance, repair and operations inventory management can reduce costs, with 58.9% of facilities reporting a decline in downtime and costs with better parts inventory management.
While replacing aging equipment remains a predominant strategy for facility managers to mitigate operational risks, there are current economic conditions that present significant challenges, with capital projects becoming more complex, MaintainX says. As a result, 28.3% of respondents wrestling with aging equipment said that they plan to combat the problem by improving the quality and frequency of training.
