Downtime Record

This record exists to measure one outage, precisely, from stop to restart. It is not the place to plan the repair, request the parts, or review the trend — those are separate steps in the same programme, and folding them in here is what makes downtime data impossible to report on later.

ISO 55001 doesn't prescribe a downtime form, but its performance evaluation clause requires asset performance to be monitored against criteria the organisation has itself defined — and several supporting clauses shape what that measurement has to look like in practice.

ISO 55001 is a voluntary management-systems standard, so its pull comes from certification schemes and customer contracts rather than statute — but the weight of that pull varies sharply by market.

Filling in every field is mechanical. The judgement calls are in deciding what the numbers actually mean before they're signed off.

The gaps that recur in downtime records tend to fall in the same six places, almost always because the record was closed for speed rather than for accuracy.

A packing line stopped for four hours and the shift log recorded one Downtime Record: Reason Category 'Mechanical failure', Duration Hours 4, Status Complete. On paper it looked like a routine repair. The phase fields, filled in only after a supervisor pushed back, told a different story: eleven minutes to notice the stop, forty minutes to get a technician on site, ninety minutes waiting for a bearing that wasn't in the local store, and only fifty minutes of actual repair.

None of those numbers pointed at maintenance competence. They pointed at a parts-holding gap and a response-time gap that a single four-hour total had completely absorbed. Once the record carried the breakdown, the ninety-minute wait routed into a Critical Spares Review instead of counting against the technician's average repair time — which is the difference between fixing the actual constraint and re-training someone for a problem they didn't cause.

The form captures the event. What actually determines whether the number gets used is whether it's routed, checked and rolled up before anyone needs it for a decision.

KnowMaintain

Holds the downtime library against the asset register and work order history, flags records missing a phase breakdown or a second signature, and keeps the link to backlog and spares data live.

KnowQuality

Picks up the production-impact fields — units lost, orders affected — and folds them into the same nonconformance view that food safety and customer complaint data already feed.

KnowSafe

Watches for downtime events on assets already flagged as safety- or food-safety-critical, and escalates a pattern of unplanned stoppages before it becomes an incident.

Ella

Chases the missing signature or the blank phase field, rolls this period's downtime hours into one view against the trend, and holds every write for approval before it touches a record.

Planned downtime

A stoppage scheduled in advance — a changeover, a clean, a planned shutdown — that is expected and does not indicate a reliability problem on its own.

Unplanned downtime

A stoppage caused by an unexpected failure or condition, the category that drives reliability metrics and warrants root-cause investigation.

Time to diagnose

The interval between a technician arriving at the asset and identifying the specific cause of the stoppage, distinct from the time spent actually repairing it.

MTTR

Mean time to repair — the average duration of the repair phase alone across a set of downtime events, one of the figures this record's phase breakdown makes possible to calculate.

Ready backlog

Outstanding work that has parts, permits and a plan already in place, as distinct from work still waiting on one of those — the concept that links a downtime event's Work Order ID forward into backlog reporting.