LEANworx has a special feature for machine downtime tracking at the start and end of every shift, and shows this as a separate report. Each day’s report was emailed to the shop head the next morning.

After a couple of weeks of quiet observation, the report from the CNC monitoring for the previous day was printed every day, for all machines.. This was put on the shop notice board every morning. Everybody now knew everybody else’s shift change downtime. It became difficult for people to continue with what was basically poor work ethics.

Here is a report from a machine being monitored by LEANworx, that shows downtime at shift change for a machine that works 3 shifts of 8 hours each, with meal and tea breaks totalling 50 minutes in each shift. The report shows a total downtime of 18 hours for 3 shifts over 6 days, which means 3 hours per day. That’s a HUGE 14% of the available time. Also, notice that 14.5 hours of the 18, or 80%, are in just shift 2 and 3.

Firm and machine names have been changed to protect the identity of the firm.