Production Downtime Cost Calculator
What does one stopped hour actually cost your line? Lost contribution, idle crew, the restart ramp and the scrap coming back up to spec — priced properly, so you can take a number to the board instead of an adjective.
Sets a starting restart-ramp time. A kiln does not come back like a filling line.
Selling price minus material and variable cost — not the selling price.
Used for scrap, where the material is gone rather than just unsold.
Untick this if a stop means maintenance, cleaning or another line. On many plants it genuinely does, and counting the labour anyway overstates the case.
typical for this sector: 30 min
Currency conversion is indicative only — the figure is the same number restated, not a comparison between markets.
If you are taking it into a capital request, it is worth an engineer checking it against your actual line — and telling you which of these stoppages were preventable.
Have an engineer review your figuresWe run plant IT and OT for cement, aluminium, cables and food processing across Oman.
How this is worked out
A stopped line does not lose a slice of turnover — it loses the margin on units it did not make. The material you did not consume is still in the store. Using revenue would overstate the loss, sometimes by several times.
A stop is longer than its own duration. Coming back to rated speed takes minutes on a filling line and hours on a kiln, and output during that climb is well below rated. We price the shortfall at half output across the ramp.
Units binned coming back up to spec are charged at full unit cost rather than margin. That material is consumed and thrown away, so the loss is the whole of it.
If a stop means the crew does cleaning, changeover or maintenance, the labour is not lost and the checkbox turns it off. Counting it regardless is the most common way these figures get inflated.
Overtime to recover the schedule, late-delivery penalties, expedited freight, and the cost of missing a customer commitment. These are real and are often larger than everything above — but they vary so much by contract that any default would be a guess dressed up as a number. Add them yourself once you have the figure below.