TECHNOLOGY FOCUS Cutting costs
FROM DOWNTIME TO DECISIONS: BUILDING CONNECTED RESILIENCE
FROM DOWNTIME TO DECISIONS: BUILDING CONNECTED RESILIENCE
Paraic O’Lochlainn, VP of eMaint at Fluke Corporation, addresses the issue of downtime on an international scale, and explains how predictive and preventative maintenance turns data into decision intelligence
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owntime is an open secret everyone knows, but solutions rather than root causes. Across
countries such as the UK, Germany, and impact is the same: lower productivity and downtime is more than just a maintenance issue. Businesses must understand it poses a term competitiveness.
The true cost of downtime Fluke’s 2025 cross-market research, conducted in partnership with Censuswide, surveyed 600 senior manufacturing leaders across the UK, Germany, and the US. It revealed that 61% of global manufacturers year, losing up to an estimated $852 million every week.
Downtime has become a silent global well beyond factory walls: diminished weakened competitiveness compound with every hour lost.
Fluke’s data shows that nearly one in multiple times per day, and 15% report terms, even the best-case scenarios still cost around $5 million per incident. In severe cases, costs can reach $126 million per incident.
psychological. More than 40% of C-suites in
automationmagazine.co.uk
the survey said downtime directly undermines customer trust. Another 37% cited the impact on workforce morale, with employee frustration and attrition increasing as disruptions persist. When people lose faith in systems, they start losing faith in leadership.
In the UK, downtime often manifests as long-duration outages. Manufacturers face structural barriers, from data silos to outdated technology infrastructure (52%), followed by cybersecurity concerns and limited integration of new digital tools. In Germany, the issue is more cultural. While it leads on automation and data-driven manufacturing, 44% of German leaders cite limited internal skills or training as the main obstacle to predictive maintenance. Germany’s frequent delays in obtaining spare parts, with 33% saying maintenance is “very frequently” delayed due to long lead times. In the US, budget and resource constraints
their main barrier to modernising maintenance, while nearly half (45%) said regulatory and compliance burdens slow down technology integration.
Despite these variations, the outcome is compounding downtime. Downtime is a universal problem; therefore depends on “connected reliability”, an integrated ecosystem where people, data, and assets are synchronised across the enterprise.
to failure, organisations anticipate it through continuous insight. Predictive and prescriptive maintenance models turn data from sensors, machines, and cloud systems into real-time decision intelligence, connecting Leadership and culture are decisive factors. Despite growing investment in digital transformation, only 17% of leaders say their workforce is fully trained on new technologies introduced in the past two years. training coverage, compared to 17% in the US core truth: resilience is built as much through people as through systems. A connected workforce that understands how to interpret data and act on insights is the backbone of a connected enterprise.
Building resilience for the future reacting in silos or commit to systemic vulnerability for manufacturers across the globe. Long, infrequent shocks in the UK, frequent interruptions in Germany, and resource constraints in the US are all traceable to the same cause – fragmented reliability. It is time for businesses to rethink strategies this connected resilience will be stay ahead in this volatile world.
eMaint CMMS is a cloud-based computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) used to manage maintenance activities, assets and reliability programmes. It helps companies manage work order and maintenance schedules, track asset health and history, monitor condition data from machines, manage spare parts, inventory and maintenance costs and run preventative and predictive maintenance programmes.
Fluke
Automation | March 2026 29
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