Equipment failures, OT/software crashes, power outages, quality defects, supply chain disruptions, safety stoppages — every one of them has a real dollar cost, and most SMB manufacturers have never actually run the numbers. This free suite estimates what unplanned downtime costs your specific operation, benchmarks it against published industry research, and shows you where to focus first.
Most plants track uptime. Far fewer translate an hour of downtime into an actual dollar figure that shows up in a budget conversation — which means the case for fixing the root cause never gets made with the urgency it deserves. These three figures are widely cited across manufacturing and IT-operations research:
These are useful context, not your number. Your actual cost depends on your revenue per hour of production, your labor structure, how many incidents you actually absorb per year, and what kind of incident it is — a 20-minute line jam is a very different event from a 6-hour plant-wide power outage. Run your own numbers on the Calculator →
Not all downtime is the same shape. Each of these carries a different cost profile — some hit production value hardest, others hit scrap, penalties, or idle labor. See the full breakdown on the By Incident Type page →
Bearing seizures, motor burnout, hydraulic/pneumatic failures, conveyor jams. Usually the single most frequent category.
Explore →PLC/SCADA crashes, HMI failures, firmware bugs, OT network loss, MES/ERP outages blocking the scheduling floor.
Explore →Grid loss, voltage sag, compressed air or utility interruption — often worse than the outage window itself once restart/ramp-up time is counted.
Explore →Out-of-spec batches, contamination, mislabeling, field returns — cost shows up in scrap, rework, and customer trust.
Explore →Supplier outage, raw material shortage, logistics failure — a starved line costs almost as much as a broken one.
Explore →Injury, near-miss stop-work, OSHA/EPA findings — idle labor plus legal, insurance, and reputational exposure.
Explore →Our calculator models cost across four components — the same structure used across most operational-downtime research, adapted for a plant-floor context:
Revenue your line would have generated during the downtime window, adjusted for how much of normal output was actually lost (a full stoppage vs. a partial slowdown).
Operators, technicians, and line staff who are paid whether or not the line is running — multiplied by headcount affected and hours down.
Parts, contractor callouts, overtime premiums, and the restart/ramp-up time many teams forget to count until output is back at full rate.
Scrap and rework, expedited freight, customer penalties or SLA credits, and — for safety or quality events especially — reputational and regulatory exposure.
Illustrative examples, not survey data — these run a representative 50–250 employee, single-plant manufacturer (~$20M/yr revenue, two shifts) through our own calculator at typical durations for each incident type. Your numbers will differ; use the Calculator for your own plant.
| Incident Type | Typical Duration | Illustrative Cost | Primary Driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unplanned equipment failure | 2–4 hrs | $9K – $19K | Lost production + repair |
| Software / controls / OT failure | 1–3 hrs | $5K – $14K | Lost production + IT/OT support |
| Power / utility outage | 1–6 hrs (+ restart) | $6K – $40K | Lost production, whole-plant |
| Quality defect / recall event | N/A — per batch | $8K – $60K+ | Scrap/rework + customer penalty |
| Supply chain disruption | 4 hrs – 3 days | $7K – $75K | Idle labor + starved-line production loss |
| Safety / compliance incident | 1–8 hrs stop-work | $5K – $30K+ | Idle labor + regulatory/legal exposure |
See the full index, including cost-by-duration and cost-by-company-size tables, on the Cost Index page →
Five free, vendor-neutral tools for putting a number on operational downtime and knowing where to act first.
The hub page — headline benchmarks, cost components, and links into the full suite.
You're hereModel a real incident against your own revenue, labor, and recovery costs — get a full breakdown instantly.
Open the Calculator →Benchmark tables by incident type, duration, and company size for SMB manufacturing.
View the Index →Deep dive on each incident category — cost drivers, typical duration, and mitigations.
Browse Types →MTTR, MTBF, OEE, RTO/RPO, and the rest of the operational-reliability vocabulary, plant-floor edition.
Read the Glossary →Yes. Unlike generic IT-downtime or cybersecurity cost calculators, this suite is built around the cost structure of a physical production operation — lost production value, idle plant-floor labor, scrap/rework, and recovery/restart costs — scaled for SMB manufacturers rather than large enterprises or data-center operators.
Any unplanned event that stops or degrades production, quality, or safety on the plant floor — equipment failure, a software/OT/controls failure, a power or utility outage, a quality defect or recall, a supply chain disruption, or a safety/compliance stoppage. See the By Incident Type page for the full breakdown.
The three headline stats (11% revenue loss, 60%/85% OEE, 98%/$100K) are drawn from published, widely-cited industry research — Siemens/Senseye, Vorne/OEE.com, and ITIC. The cost-snapshot tables and calculator output are our own illustrative estimates based on typical SMB inputs, clearly labeled as such — not survey results. Full methodology on the Cost Index page.
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to email yourself a copy of the results.
It's a directional estimate, not an audit. It's only as good as the numbers you put in — revenue per hour, labor rate, and incident duration. Treat the output as a basis for an internal conversation about where to invest in reliability, not a precise forecast.