Key takeaways
- Downtime cost has three parts: lost production value + idle labor + other (scrap, energy, expediting).
- Lost sales alone understates the real number - often by half.
- Figures range from hundreds of euros per hour on a small line to over €2M/hour in automotive.
- Even a 25% reduction usually pays back monitoring many times over.
Ask two people what an hour of downtime costs and you'll get two very different answers. Finance sees lost sales. The plant sees a scramble. Both are right - and both are incomplete. The true cost is bigger than either, and getting it right is the difference between a maintenance budget that gets approved and one that doesn't.
The three components
The defensible cost of one stopped hour adds three things:
- Lost production value = output rate × contribution margin per unit. The profit you didn't make - not revenue, margin.
- Idle labor = operators still on the clock × their fully-loaded hourly rate. They're paid whether the line runs or not.
- Other costs = scrap produced at restart, wasted energy and utilities, and any overtime or expediting freight to catch up.
A worked example
A line making 1,000 units/hour at €1.20 margin, 4 operators at €35/hour loaded, and €100/hour of restart and energy cost:
| Component | Per hour |
|---|---|
| Lost production (1,000 × €1.20) | €1,200 |
| Idle labor (4 × €35) | €140 |
| Other (scrap, energy) | €100 |
| Total per hour | €1,440 |
| At 20 hours/month → per year | €345,600 |
Enter your own figures and get the per-hour, monthly and annual cost instantly - with a breakdown you can take to finance.
What downtime really costs, by scale
Published figures vary by orders of magnitude - which is exactly why your own number matters more than any headline average:
| Context | Typical cost / hour |
|---|---|
| Single small line, low-margin goods | Hundreds of € |
| Mid-size F&B / packaging line | €1,000 – €25,000 |
| Large process / CPG plant | Tens of thousands € |
| Automotive assembly | Up to ~€2.3M |
Treat these as orientation, not gospel - they're benchmarks drawn from widely reported industry studies, not your plant.
The part most calculations miss
Big breakdowns get logged and costed. The expensive surprise is the small stuff: the short, frequent stops that never make it into a downtime report at all. Individually they're trivial; together they often cost more than the headline breakdowns. That's the hidden factory - and it's why a plant can have "good" downtime numbers and still bleed output. You can size that loss here.
Building the business case
Once you have a credible per-hour figure, the case for reducing downtime almost writes itself. A 25% reduction on the example above is €86,400/year from one line - far more than the cost of monitoring it. The CMMS / Monitoring ROI calculator turns this into a payback figure.
The one caveat: monitoring only pays back if you act on it. You have to find the recurring causes and fix them - which means automatic detection plus a way to see what actually happened.
Fabrico reads every stop from the machine, shows the true cause on video, and auto-routes a work order - so recurring downtime stops recurring.
Frequently asked questions
Should I use revenue or margin for lost production?
Margin. You only "lose" the profit you would have earned, not the full sale price (you didn't incur the variable cost of making the unit). Using revenue overstates the figure and gets challenged.
What about planned downtime?
Planned maintenance and changeovers are usually excluded from planned production time, so they don't count as downtime cost - but reducing changeover time (SMED) still improves availability.
What's not in this number?
Hard-to-quantify costs - missed-delivery penalties, lost customers, safety risk, brand damage. So treat the calculated figure as a floor, not a ceiling.