Downtime Tracking Software for Production LinesSee every stop as it happens. Know what it costs in OEE.

Machine downtime is logged from the machine itself, not from memory at the end of the shift, so short stops are counted as well as long ones. Fabrico reads the run and stop state from the signal, stamps the start time and counts the duration until production resumes.

Each machine is set up once in the machine registry, with its files and repair history, and gets a color timeline of run time, stops and micro-stops. On that timeline, a shift full of short stops looks nothing like a shift with one long breakdown, even when the total minutes are the same.

One plant can mix three signal sources, picked per machine and explained on our machine monitoring software page:

• PLC connection: on automated machines, the signal is read live from the controller.
• IoT sensor: fitted to an older machine that has no usable PLC output.
• Camera: on manual or hybrid lines, computer vision watches the line and recognizes when it stands still.

The machine signal tells you that a line stopped. The people at the line know why, so each stop gets its cause from the operator.

In the Fabrico app, the operator picks the cause from a list of reasons agreed with your team, such as material shortage, changeover, waiting for maintenance or breakdown. The start and length of the stop come from the machine signal, so the operator only adds the reason.

Each coded stop carries the machine, line and shift it belongs to. That is what lets the same stop be counted later by cause, by line or by shift.

Fabrico runs on iOS and Android tablets and in the browser. The interface is available in English, Bulgarian, German, French and Polish, and more languages can be added.

An operator who looks after several machines can scan a machine's QR code to open it, instead of searching the plant list.

The same data is on screen while the shift runs. The dashboard shows which machines are running, which are down and for how long, next to the current OEE.

Dashboards are configured for your company, so production and maintenance look at one agreed set of numbers. Where it is used during the day:

• On the floor: a TV by the line shows the live state, so the whole team sees a long stop while it is happening.
• At shift change: the stop list for the last shift shows each stop with its cause and duration, and the next shift sees which machines are still down.
• In the morning meeting: the meeting-room screen shows yesterday's biggest downtime causes per line, so the discussion starts from the largest loss.
• Away from the line: a plant manager checks the current OEE of each line in the Fabrico app on a phone.
• For maintenance: stops coded as breakdown or waiting for maintenance show which lines need a technician.

Downtime is the availability part of OEE. Availability compares the time a machine actually ran with the time it was planned to run, so every stop counted as downtime lowers it.

Fabrico calculates OEE as Availability × Performance × Quality. Unplanned downtime, such as a breakdown or a wait for material, shows up in the availability factor of that machine and shift.

When availability drops on a line, the stop list for that line and shift shows which causes pulled it down. Downtime and OEE come from one source, so there is no second spreadsheet to reconcile.

Fabrico detects micro-stops from the machine signal and reports them apart from long stops. Slow cycles count as performance loss rather than downtime, so the team can tell a machine that stood still from one that ran below its standard speed.

See our OEE software for the full OEE layer. To put a value on the gap between your current and target OEE, use our OEE calculator.