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Planned Downtime

Scheduled maintenance, changeovers, setup, and other intentionally planned production stops — tracked to optimise scheduling and protect equipment health.

Formula

Sum of all scheduled stop durations

Benchmarks

World-class: Closely matches schedule, minimised through SMED Good: 5–10% of total time Typical: 10–15% of total time Poor: >15% or significantly exceeding schedule

What Is Planned Downtime?

Planned Downtime covers all intentionally scheduled production stops — preventive maintenance, changeovers, setup, calibration, cleaning, and training. Unlike unplanned downtime, these stops are expected and scheduled in advance.

The goal is not to eliminate planned downtime (maintenance is essential) but to minimise it while protecting equipment health, and to ensure actual planned downtime closely matches the schedule.

What It Includes

  • Preventive maintenance windows
  • Product changeovers and setup
  • Planned cleaning (CIP, washdowns)
  • Calibration
  • Training and meetings during production time

Data Requirements

SourceRequiredWhat You Need
Machine DataYesMachine state transitions, timestamps, stop durations
ConfigurationYesMaintenance schedule, downtime reason code definitions
ERP/MESOptionalPlanned changeover schedule

Planned Downtime is a Phase 2 metric — it requires machine state tracking and clear classification of planned versus unplanned stops.

Why It Matters

  • Validates maintenance planning — comparing actual to planned duration reveals whether schedules are realistic
  • Identifies scheduling opportunities — consolidate or optimise the timing of planned stops
  • Tracks changeover efficiency — a key target for SMED and continuous improvement initiatives
  • Capacity planning input — realistic available production time depends on knowing how much planned downtime to expect

Common Pitfalls

  • Overusing the “planned” classification to hide poor performance — if unplanned work is coded as planned, the data becomes meaningless
  • Not distinguishing between maintenance and changeovers — these have different optimisation approaches
  • Poor schedule adherence tracking — if you don’t compare actual to planned, you can’t improve

Best Practices

  • Schedule planned downtime during off-peak production periods where possible
  • Consolidate maintenance activities to minimise the number of separate stops
  • Track actual versus planned duration to improve scheduling accuracy over time
  • Use SMED techniques to reduce Changeover Time
  • Balance planned downtime with equipment reliability needs — cutting maintenance to gain production time usually backfires as Unplanned Downtime