Your shop floor machines are either actively running in production mode and or they are experiencing downtime. Hopefully, when the machines are expected to be running, they are performing the way they are designed to— unfortunately, this is where manufacturing can get tricky. Many manufacturers still rely on outdated pen-and-paper charting to report how their machines are running throughout...

The need to identify and eliminate unplanned machine downtime is somewhat obvious, however, what is really a planned vs an unplanned downtime is something that is not always so obvious.  In addition, planned downtime seems to be more accepted as something that just must happen as the cost of doing business.  While true to an extent, many planned downtimes can be...