Radovan Slíž · WorkSys.Space · 27/08/2026
One hour, a sheet of paper and the last ten outages
If you want to do one thing for maintenance this month with the best benefit-to-effort ratio, open up your last ten outages. No system is needed for that.
If you want to do one thing for maintenance this month with the best benefit-to-effort ratio, try this: open up your last ten outages.
For each of them, three pieces of data are enough. How long it lasted. What was not produced during it. Who worked on it and for how long. No system is needed, an hour of time, the shift records and a sheet of paper will do.
The first working number
When you add it up, you get your first working number for an hour of standstill. It will not be exact. Part of the production gets caught up with overtime, penalties depend on the customer, restarting the line is a different story every time. But for the first time it will be a number instead of a feeling, and decisions suddenly become comparable: whether a night maintenance shift pays off, whether to keep more expensive parts in stock.
What ten rows side by side reveal
And one more thing happens along the way that few people expect. The mere list of ten outages side by side often reveals a pattern that is invisible in day-to-day operation. One machine keeps repeating. One shift keeps repeating. A fault keeps repeating that has already been fixed three times.
That third case tends to be the most valuable. When the same fault on the same machine shows up three times in ten rows, it is suddenly there in black and white that the symptom is being fixed, not the cause. Individual reports never show that, each of them looks like a closed case. Ten rows side by side say more than a year of individual reports.
You will want software for this one day, manual logging does not survive in the long run. But the first ten rows can be handled by paper. And they pay off even if nothing else ever follows them.
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