Every SMB manufacturer knows their line lost time last week. Almost none can name the top three reasons by minutes-lost. The data exists. It lives in the maintenance tech's head, the supervisor's sticky notes, the shift-change handover sheet. It just never gets aggregated. Ignite Lean captures it at the moment the operator notices the line is down, categorises it against an admin-controlled reason catalog, and rolls it into a plant-wide pareto. Engineering finally sees the same five reasons month over month and can actually fix them.
The compressor drops. The torque tool stops triggering. The next kit isn't at the station. The operator hits the downtime button on the kiosk, picks a reason from a short list (equipment, material, labor, planned, other), and the timer starts. When it ends, they hit stop. Total elapsed time, reason, station, operator. Captured in one record. No supervisor walking around with a clipboard, no "I think it was about 20 minutes around 2 p.m.".
Every plant defines downtime differently. The admin settings page lets you build the catalog that matches how YOUR organisation thinks about lost time. Codes (machine-down, waiting-material, line-balance, shift-change, planned-maintenance), human-friendly labels, sort order, and an active/inactive toggle for retiring categories without losing historical data. Reasons are org-scoped, not industry-baked, because your downtime taxonomy is part of your continuous-improvement DNA.
Insights → KPIs rolls every downtime event into a pareto chart: reasons on the x-axis, total minutes on the y-axis, sorted descending. The classic 80/20 finding. Five reasons explain 80% of the lost time, jumps off the page. Filter by date range (last 7 / 30 / 90 days), by plant, by line. The conversation in the Monday meeting shifts from "we should look into the compressor" to "the compressor cost us 18.4 hours last month, here's the work order".
When the operator starts a downtime event, the workstation's status light on the live supervisor floor turns red and shows the reason. The supervisor sees it the moment it happens. Not at the end of shift, not in next week's report. One tap to open the station drawer shows how long it's been down, the reason, and the operator's notes. The supervisor can dispatch the maintenance tech in the same minute the downtime started.
Most classic MES platforms charge a separate downtime-tracking module ($20k–$40k a year), require a dedicated touchscreen at each station, and need an integrator to map your reasons into their hard-coded taxonomy. Ignite Lean includes downtime tracking in the base product, runs on the same tablet that's already at the workstation, and lets you define your own reason taxonomy in five minutes from the admin settings page. Same outcome. Fraction of the cost.
It captures every time a workstation stops, tags it with a reason (equipment, material, labor, planned), and rolls the events into reports so you can see which reasons cost the most time. Ignite Lean captures downtime at the tablet the moment the operator notices the line is down.
An operator taps a downtime button on the workstation tablet, picks a reason from a short admin-defined list, and the timer starts. When the issue clears they tap stop. Start time, end time, reason, station, and operator are all captured automatically.
Every event rolls into a pareto chart by reason and minutes lost, filterable by date range, plant, and line. The finding that a handful of reasons explain most of the lost time jumps off the page, so engineering fixes the right things first.
No. Downtime tracking is included in the base product and runs on the same tablet already at the workstation. There is no separate license, dedicated terminal, or integrator project.
Yes. The reason catalog is fully admin-configurable: add, rename, sort, and retire reasons without losing historical data. Your taxonomy, not an industry default.
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