Justification tool

Downtime Cost Calculator

Almost every plant underprices its own downtime, because the number that gets quoted is usually just idle wages. Lost contribution margin, recovery overtime, expedited freight and startup scrap are the larger share. Build the number from your own figures here — then take it into any conversation about changeover time.

Faztek Industrial Solutions
Cost of Downtime — Analysis

1. What stops

Only affects the defaults we suggest — every field stays editable.
$
Selling price minus material and other truly variable cost — not net profit.
40%
If you run at capacity and the order ships late, this is near 0%. If you have slack shifts, it's high — but making it up costs overtime, which gets counted separately below.

2. What keeps costing money while nothing moves

$
30%
Housekeeping, training, 5S. Honest answers here are usually lower than the answer you get in a meeting.
$
Depreciation, lease, utilities, supervision — spread over planned production hours. Leave at $0 if your finance team refuses to count unabsorbed overhead as a downtime cost. Many do.

3. Cost of catching back up

Per event
%
50% = time-and-a-half. Applies only to the output you said you'd make up.
$
First-off inspection, purge material, temperature or tolerance ramp-up.
$
Only if a stoppage of this length typically puts a shipment at risk. Set $0 if it doesn't.

4. How often, and for how long

These two fields drive the annual figure only. The headline cost-per-hour above is independent of them.

5. Apply it to guarding & framing changes

Optional

This is where the number becomes an argument. Modular framing rarely wins on purchase price — it wins because the line is down for hours instead of days.

Adding access, moving a fence line, re-splitting a cell, new product changeover.
Include area clearing, hot work permit, fire watch, fume clearance, cure and cleanup.
Bolted connections, no hot work, so much of the work can happen without clearing the area.
True cost of one hour down
$0
— per minute

What makes up that hour

Scaled up

Per stoppage
—
 
Per year
—
 

Framing changeovers

Annual downtime avoided with modular
$0
 
Use this rate in the lifecycle calculator →

Your hourly rate is saved locally and will pre-fill there.

How this is calculated

The hourly rate

Three components, added together:

  • Lost contribution margin — output you don't produce, reduced by the share you genuinely make up later.
  • Idle labor — people you're paying who can't work, reduced by the share of that time you redeploy usefully.
  • Unabsorbed fixed overhead — only if you chose to count it.

Recovery costs — overtime premium, startup scrap, expediting — are charged per event rather than per hour, because they don't scale linearly with stoppage length.

Where people get it wrong

  • Counting revenue instead of margin. You don't lose the material cost of a unit you never built. Using revenue overstates the number and gets the whole analysis dismissed.
  • Assuming full recovery. If the plant is near capacity, lost hours are lost permanently — set recovery low.
  • Double-counting recovery. Output you make up isn't lost margin, but the overtime to make it up is a real cost. This model separates the two.
  • Ignoring restart. Scrap and requalification on restart are often the single largest per-event cost in process operations.

A planning estimate built from the inputs shown. Not a quotation, and not a substitute for your own cost accounting. Validate against actual downtime records before using it in a capital request.