Downtime Is Inevitable. Long Outages Aren’t.

A conveyor stops on a Tuesday afternoon, and two technicians respond. One has 22 years on that floor, while the other is only eight months in. The more experienced team member handles the problem and has the conveyor back up in 40 minutes.

But what happens when the senior technician is out sick and the same stoppage occurs the following week? The less experienced colleague, unfamiliar with the failure and the fix for it, takes four hours and a vendor call to sort it out.

For any organization, the challenge is to bridge that experience gap and avoid extended downtime without overreliance on institutional knowledge.

The Cost of Downtime

ABB's 2025 Modernization for Resilience report, based on a survey of 3,600 senior decision-makers across 14 industries, estimates that unplanned downtime can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000 per hour. Industries that were surveyed include:

• Energy/power
• Oil and gas
• Food and beverage
• Chemical
• Plastics and rubber
• Water/wastewater
• Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC)
• Wind
• Rail
• Mining
• Utilities
• Marine
• Metals
• Other sectors

ABB noted that 7% of leaders reported hourly downtime costs exceeding $500,000. According to Siemens research, downtime in the automotive industry costs $2.3 million per hour in lost production.

Most operations leaders know their hourly downtime cost. Bringing the number down means having a clear picture of what drives failures and how the team responds when equipment goes down.

A four-hour outage on a committed line can also add:

• Idle payroll
• Expedited freight costs to recover a missed shipment
• Callout premiums for after-hours vendor support
• Contractual penalties for a missed delivery window

Missed delivery windows also show up in customer QBRs and sourcing reviews. A line that misses commitments twice in a quarter draws attention from the customer's procurement team, who starts asking about redundancy plans and contingency sourcing. Sales teams get pulled into recovery conversations that used to be routine renewals. For public companies, chronic downtime can find its way into earnings calls.

There are two levers for improvement that can help lower the cost of downtime: reducing how often equipment fails and figuring out how to get back up faster.

Lever One: Reducing How Often Equipment Fails

A  preventive maintenance (PM) program  can reduce how often equipment fails. Imagine the following hypothetical scenarios:

• A facilities team catches a motor bearing starting to fail on a routine walk, turning a possible $8,000 repair and three days offline into a $400 job that takes two hours.
• On a quarterly electrical walk, thermal imaging picks up a hot connection in a control panel; a $200 fix keeps it from taking down the whole process.
• On a high-cycle press, technicians trace recurring seal failures to a lubrication schedule that missed the actual failure mechanism. Adjusting the schedule reduces failures going forward.

Catches like those come from people who have run PM on the same equipment long enough to know its baseline. Knowing whether a pump running two degrees warmer than it did on the last few inspections or an unusual vibration signature on a specific motor is worth flagging comes down to familiarity built over years. According to research from the U.S. Department of Energy, PM programs can deliver an estimated 12% to 18% cost savings over reactive maintenance programs.

Lever Two: Getting Back Up Faster

Once a failure happens, the first 15 minutes of diagnosis shapes most of what follows. A misread at the start sends the repair in the wrong direction. Each step compounds the initial error. Technicians with limited hands-on time with a given system tend to address the visible fault instead of the underlying cause. The same failure might return on the next shift or the following week.

Knowing when to hand a problem off to someone more familiar with that equipment is its own skill, built through working alongside experienced technicians. A technician unfamiliar with a system can create a second problem on top of the first, adding hours to the outage.

Escalation is where a lot of avoidable downtime can grow. A technician working an extra hour to close out the job on their own ends up costing the operation more than one call to the shift supervisor would have. Culture drives that behavior as much as skill does. Organizations that treat calling for help as good judgment recover faster than ones that treat it as a weakness. The difference tends to show up in the numbers over a quarter or two.

Teams with deeper equipment-specific experience recover faster because they've seen more failure modes and understand how those systems interact under different conditions. Work order history from the actual floor is where diagnostic training should be grounded. Three extra hours of downtime on a committed production line means idle headcount and orders falling further behind.

For operations with penalty clauses in customer contracts, the slow recovery cost can climb well past the repair itself.

The Aging Workforce Gap

When equipment and system knowledge live in a technician's memory instead of documentation, the organization concentrates years of experience in one person. That risk grows as technicians approach retirement. A Plant Engineering survey found that 72% of maintenance professionals are 50 or older. These are often veteran technicians who developed their expertise after years of contact with the same machines across seasons and operating conditions.

They know the equipment's summer behavior, which fault codes are misleading and which vendor to call when the standard channel is unresponsive.

Contractor coverage fills some gaps when technicians retire, but there are tradeoffs. Contractors bring depth on their specialty, but they rotate through many sites and rarely develop the same feel for a specific floor that an on-staff technician does over years. After-hours emergency rate premiums also mean outsourcing tribal knowledge often ends up costing more than capturing it in-house would have, especially in the first year or two after a senior technician retires.

New technicians generally arrive with solid foundational training. Learning how specific equipment behaves across its full range takes years on those machines.

Once the most experienced technician on a floor is 18 months from retirement, the organization has 18 months to capture what they know.

Building a Program That Lasts

Getting senior technicians' knowledge and experience into documentation takes planning. Standard operating procedure plans should reflect their expertise of how the machines behave, the failures they've worked through and the cautions they've built up over time. Organizations should get that knowledge documented while those technicians are still on staff. Structured sessions where experienced staff walk through failure histories on their equipment give the rest of the team something to work from later.

New technicians need supervised time on the machines they'll maintain, working through failures alongside someone who has managed that equipment for years. Pairing new hires with experienced technicians on PM rounds accelerates the transfer considerably. The specifics of how a floor's equipment behaves under varying loads and temperatures come from time in that environment. Failures that keep showing up in work order data help identify where training coverage has been thin. Using that feedback to update the training program over time makes it more specific to the floor it serves.

Where Does Your Program Stand?

Most maintenance organizations are doing their best with the staff and budget available. Whether the team has what it needs to catch failures early and recover quickly is an honest question to bring into a training conversation.

Everything above comes down to how prepared your team is when equipment fails and how deliberately you built that preparedness. A modernized training approach makes your team more prepared — and builds the systems and processes to keep them that way.

Drawing on a market survey of nearly 200 industrial maintenance organizations,  The Gap in Industrial Maintenance Team Training: A Call for Modernization  covers the limits of traditional training and the case for adopting advanced training technologies. For more on where the biggest opportunities in maintenance training lie — and to determine how well your team is seizing them —  read our report .