Radovan Slíž · WorkSys.Space · 13/08/2026
Nobody can price an hour of downtime to the euro. And that is not the point
Most companies make big maintenance and monitoring decisions without one number: what an hour of line standstill costs them. An exact number does not exist. A working one does.
Nobody can price an hour of downtime for you to the euro. Part of the production can be caught up with overtime, part is lost forever, the penalty depends on the customer, and restarting the line is a different story every time.
What is interesting, though, is what happens when I ask about it in a meeting. Usually an estimate comes, the off-the-cuff kind, where people in the room glance at each other to check whether it sounds right. And yet big decisions rest on that number: whether a night maintenance shift pays off, whether to keep expensive spare parts in stock, whether machine monitoring is worth the investment.
A working number instead of an exact one
The point is not to have an exact number. It is to have a working number. An internal rate for an hour of line standstill that the company has agreed on, imperfect as it is. The moment it exists, decisions become comparable: this breakdown cost us this much, this investment pays back in this long. Without it, what gets compared is feelings.
Take one of those decisions, the night maintenance shift. Without an internal rate, the debate goes in circles. Maintenance insists it pays off, finance asks what that is based on, and in the end the person with the stronger voice decides. With a rate, the same debate turns into a single question: how many hours of night downtime would the shift have to save per year to pay for itself? That is no longer a contest of opinions. That is a number you can check against last year's records.
Where we come in
The rate is a decision, not technology. The company has to set it itself, no software will do that for it. We come in with the WorkSys.Space platform only at the second step, when downtime durations and their context need to be collected automatically, because manual logging dies in its third week. The system then records when the line stood, for how long and at which machine, and the internal rate turns those hours into sums you can make decisions about.
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