Downtime Cost Calculator
Micro-stops are the silent killer of profitability. Find out how many dollars evaporate every year when you have no real-time visibility.
Enter your baseline data
Annual downtime loss
Evaporating from your bottom line
Return on Investment (ROI)
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Stop the losses todayHow it is calculated
annual loss = (units per hour ÷ 60) × minutes stopped per day × price per unit × production days per year
- units per hour
- The line's rated speed, the one on the equipment nameplate, not the monthly average.
- minutes stopped per day
- Time the line was supposed to produce and did not, including short stops.
- price per unit
- Selling price if you want lost revenue; contribution margin if you want lost profit.
- production days per year
- The days the line had scheduled production, not the 365 calendar days.
Where to get each input
- 1Rated speed is on the equipment data sheet. If you use the actual average, you count the performance loss twice.
- 2Minutes stopped come from the shift log, but that log almost always underestimates: stops under five minutes are rarely written down and often add up to as much as the long ones.
- 3For the price, ask finance for the contribution margin. It is the number that survives an investment discussion; the selling price is useful for sizing, not for deciding.
- 4Production days are counted on the year's production calendar, minus plant shutdowns and scheduled major outages.
- 5Run the calculation with the number you believe, and again with twice the minutes. The gap between the two is what makes real measurement worth it before deciding.
What this number leaves out
- The cost of restarting. After a stop, many lines need purging, warm-up or first units that get scrapped, and none of that appears here.
- The associated scrap. A stop in a continuous process often dumps work in progress, which is lost material on top of the lost time.
- The effect on the rest of the process. If the line that stops feeds another one, the loss propagates downstream.
- Penalties and delivery commitments. A missed shipment can cost far more than the units that were not produced.
- Wear. Starting and stopping punishes equipment more than steady-state operation, and that gets paid later in maintenance.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the result so high if it is only a few minutes a day?
Because the minutes are multiplied by the days in the year. Forty-five minutes a day is about 187 hours a year, close to a month of single-shift production. Micro-stops are not felt in the moment; they are felt at the annual close.
What counts as downtime?
All the time the line was supposed to be producing and did not, including the short stops nobody logs. Planned maintenance and scheduled changeovers are separate: that is time the line was not assigned to produce.
Should I use the selling price or the margin?
The selling price gives you the revenue you did not bill. The contribution margin gives you the lost profit, which is the figure that holds up in a conversation with finance. If you are going to defend an investment, use the margin.
What if the line makes up the lost production later?
Then the loss is not a sale, it is a cost: overtime, an extra shift or subcontracting. It is still money, but it has to be valued at that cost and not at the product price.
How do I know how many minutes I really lose?
Almost nobody knows at the start. Manual logs capture the long stops and miss the ones under five minutes, which are often half of the total. Measuring automatically for a few weeks changes the number, almost always upward.
Keep going
OEE return calculator
The same problem from the other side: what raising efficiency is worth.
How to calculate OEE, step by step
To measure the real stops before putting a value on them.
Maintenance work orders
What to do with a stop once it has been logged.
Calculators to embed on your site
The same tools in an iframe, for your own site or course material.
Measure your real stops
Instrument the line for a few weeks and compare against the manual log.
Every shift without a record is data you lose. Start free.
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