There's a kind of downtime every plant has and almost no plant measures: the 10-minute stop.
A jammed feeder. A sensor that needs a wipe. A line changeover that takes "just a few minutes." Nobody logs it. It's too small to be worth the paperwork, so it never makes it into a report. And because it never makes it into a report, everyone assumes it never happens.
But it happens. Four, five times a shift. Every shift. Every day.
Do the rough math in your head — you don't need a system for this. Five unlogged stops at ten minutes each is nearly an hour of lost production per shift. That's a full shift's worth of output disappearing every few days, and nobody's investigating because nobody sees it. The production numbers just come in a little lower than expected, and the team works a little harder to catch up, and everyone treats it as normal.
It's not normal. It's just invisible.
This is the difference between downtime you know about and downtime you have. The big stoppages get meetings. The small ones get shrugged off. But the small ones are the pattern — and patterns are where the money goes.
You don't fix this by buying a system. You fix it by deciding the small stops count. A tally sheet at the line. A thirty-second note per stop. Two weeks of that, and the pattern shows itself. Most plants are surprised by what they find. Some aren't — they suspected it all along and just never looked.
The data you already have can tell you more than you think. Start with the stops nobody writes down.
If this was useful, forward it to someone who runs a plant floor.