Your operation
All inputs in GBP. Estimates are fine — you can refine the answer as you learn the numbers.
If you don't track this, a starting point: 5–10% of total production hours is typical.
hours
Total annual revenue ÷ total production hours. A 200-person manufacturer doing £25m/year on 6,000 production hours = £4,167/hour.
£
The portion of revenue that actually drops to the bottom line if you produce one more unit. Typical for UK SME manufacturers: 18–35%.
%
Operators still on the clock when the line stops. Per-hour fully-loaded cost × number of people affected.
£
Material wasted on startup/shutdown plus rework on out-of-spec units. Per affected downtime hour.
£
The real cost
Lost margin + idle labour + scrap. Annualised.
ANNUAL COST OF UNPLANNED DOWNTIME
£275,000
HOW THAT BREAKS DOWN
Lost contribution margin£175,000
Idle labour cost£64,000
Scrap & rework£36,000
POTENTIAL ANNUAL SAVINGS
30%
£82,500
CONSERVATIVE
50%
£137,500
TYPICAL
80%
£220,000
BEST-IN-CLASS
McKinsey, Deloitte, and ARC Advisory have all published research showing predictive maintenance typically delivers 30–50% reductions in unplanned downtime, with best-in-class programmes reaching 70–80%. The savings above scale your specific numbers against those benchmarks.
Getting that number down is the whole job. We monitor the assets producing it, diagnose what is actually failing, and AWI Labs engineers the fix on site — then the same data verifies whether the hours came off.