How a CMMS Helps Manufacturers Reduce Asset Downtime

Time truly is money for manufacturers. Every second a production line sits idle represents lost output, missed deadlines, and reduced profit margins. Not to mention the impact of frustratingly unpredictable maintenance schedules on team morale. 

While few manufacturers would embrace breakdowns as a strategy, many reluctantly accept them as inevitable. But this acceptance creates a troubling paradox: invest millions in high-performance equipment yet hesitate to equip teams with the systems that keep equipment running.  

Why Prevention is Cheaper Than the Cure

When equipment fails unexpectedly, you’re paying for more than just the fix. The financial impact ripples throughout your organisation in numerous ways.

Overtime expenses shoot through the roof as teams work extended hours and weekends to catch up on production schedules. Customer confidence erodes when deliveries run late, often bringing financial penalties and damaged relationships. Product quality can take a hit too as rushed repairs often lead to further failures down the line. 

For manufacturers, these combined costs can range from hundreds to thousands of pounds per minute. For larger operations, downtime costs can be much higher. 

The Downtime Challenge: Breaking the Reactive Cycle

Most organisations understand that reactive maintenance is inefficient, yet many struggle to escape its pull. This perpetual cycle is sustained by several reinforcing factors: 

Inconsistent Processes

Without standardised maintenance procedures, each technician may approach equipment differently. This variance leads to quality inconsistencies, missed steps, and ultimately, more frequent breakdowns. When documentation and processes live in multiple places—or worse, only in people’s heads—achieving reliability becomes nearly impossible. 

Misaligned Teams and Priorities

Production pressure often leads to postponed maintenance. When operations teams need to hit targets, scheduled maintenance becomes “something we’ll get to next week.” But next week brings fresh pressures, creating an ever-growing backlog of preventive work while emergency repairs continue to disrupt schedules. 

The “Hero Culture” Trap

There’s an uncomfortable truth in maintenance teams: we often celebrate the heroic efforts of those who resolve emergencies and get production running again. Meanwhile, those who quietly prevent issues through consistent preventive maintenance rarely receive the same recognition. This inadvertently builds a culture where crisis management outshines prevention. 

How a CMMS Progressively Improves Equipment Availability

Implementing a Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) creates a foundation for transforming reactive chaos into proactive efficiency. As you implement a CMMS, different capabilities help drive greater equipment reliability and uptime. 

Improved Visibility for Better Decision Making

The first breakthrough comes from simply consolidating your asset, workforce, and materials data in one place, so you can easily see: 

• Which assets fail most frequently 
• What types of failures occur 
• How long repairs typically take 
• Which parts are commonly needed 

You can make informed decisions about where to focus limited maintenance resources for maximum impact. This visibility alone can significantly reduce emergency repairs by identifying critical problem areas. 

Strategic Maintenance Scheduling

Once you understand your equipment, the next step is implementing preventive maintenance schedules. A CMMS enables you to: 

• Schedule maintenance during planned downtime or off-peak periods 
• Automatically generate work orders based on usage, time intervals, or meter readings 
• Ensure maintenance tasks include proper procedures and safety protocols 
• Allocate the right resources (people, parts, tools) to each job 

This strategic scheduling transforms maintenance from constantly reacting to emergencies to methodically preventing them, dramatically reducing unplanned downtime. 

Real-Time Monitoring and Analytics

As your maintenance approach matures, a CMMS enables more sophisticated condition monitoring and analysis. By gathering and analysing performance data, you can: 

• Identify subtle changes in equipment performance before failures occur 
• Link sensor data to automatically trigger maintenance when needed 
• Track maintenance performance metrics to continuously improve 
• Move from time-based maintenance to condition-based interventions 

This data-driven approach means maintenance happens exactly when needed—not too early (wasting resources), and not too late (causing failures). The result is optimal equipment reliability with minimal maintenance cost. 

Greater Alignment Between Operations and Maintenance

Ultimately, a CMMS creates a unified view that aligns production and maintenance teams. When everyone shares the same information: 

• Production and maintenance teams can collaborate on combined metrics like Overall Equipment Effectiveness 
• Senior leaders can track how maintenance directly contributes to production goals 

This alignment transforms maintenance from a necessary evil to a strategic contributor to business success.

Understanding the Metrics That Matter

To drive meaningful change, it’s essential to track the right metrics as you progress through your maintenance transformation. These key performance indicators demonstrate how your CMMS investment directly improves business performance: 

Planned vs. Unplanned Maintenance Ratio

This ratio reveals how much of your maintenance work is proactive versus reactive. In reactive environments, this might start at 40% planned/60% unplanned. World-class maintenance organisations achieve 80% planned or better. 

Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)

MTBF measures the average time between equipment breakdowns. As your maintenance approach matures, this number should steadily increase, confirming that equipment is running longer without issues. 

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

OEE combines availability, performance, and quality to provide a comprehensive measure of productive effectiveness. This metric helps you understand not just whether equipment is running, but how well it’s running. Industry average OEE is typically around 60%, while world-class operations achieve 85% or higher.

How Taylors Snacks Cut Asset Downtime to Just 2%

Scotland’s largest crisp manufacturer, Taylors Snacks, demonstrates what’s possible with a strategic approach to maintenance. 

Operating 200 assets across their production line, they recognised that a single point of failure could halt their entire factory. With Elecosoft’s ShireSystem CMMS, they achieved remarkable results: 

• Current downtime at just 2% 
• Every maintenance activity captured with timestamps to create a complete audit trail 
• Maintenance schedule aligned with production patterns to identify and resolve issues before they impact production 
• 10-hour potato washing cycle used as an opportunity for preventive maintenance 

“We’re a small operation, so a single point of failure can stop the factory. ShireSystem helps us to align our maintenance schedule with production plans so we can maximise the time when assets aren’t active.” — Matt Dunmore, Head of Engineering and Facilities, Taylors Snacks 

The Competitive Advantage of World-Class Uptime Performance 

By transforming maintenance from a necessary cost into a strategic advantage, a CMMS helps organisations thrive in challenging markets. The journey from reactive to proactive maintenance isn’t always straightforward, but with the right systems and approach, remarkable improvements are possible.  

Stay tuned as we share more insights on how to assess your current maintenance practices, measure improvement, and strategically invest in the capabilities that will dramatically reduce your downtime costs. Your path from reactive firefighting to predictive excellence might be shorter than you think.