What's Inside the Template
A downtime log and a ready-made dashboard in one workbook, built for the shop floor. Log stops on one sheet, and the dashboard turns them into a downtime report — no macros to enable, no pivot tables to build.
- Start Here: A three-step guide, the colour legend and every KPI explained.
- Setup: Enter your shifts, machines (with a rough cost per hour) and reason codes once, and mark each reason as Planned or Unplanned. Takes about five minutes, and every dropdown in the workbook reads from here.
- Downtime Log: One row per stop. Pick shift, machine and reason from the dropdowns and type start and end as hh:mm — duration, category and cost calculate automatically, even for night shifts across midnight. Amber highlights a missing entry or a stop longer than 8 hours.
- Dashboard: Filter by date range and machine. You get total and unplanned downtime, stops logged, Availability, MTTR, MTBF and estimated cost, plus a Pareto of the top 10 downtime reasons, downtime by machine and by shift, planned vs. unplanned, and a six-week trend.
The log ships with 482 example stops, so the dashboard is working the moment you open the file. The Start Here sheet tells you which columns to clear when you're ready to log your own.
How to Use It
- Set up — replace the example machines, shifts and reason codes on the Setup sheet with your own.
- Log — add one row per stop, as it happens or at the end of the shift. Pick the reason from the dropdown instead of typing free text, so the data stays usable later.
- Analyse — choose a date range and a machine on the Dashboard, and review the Pareto weekly: the top two or three reasons usually cause most of the lost time.
The KPIs, and How They're Calculated
- Availability — the share of planned production time the machine actually ran. Planned stops are taken out of planned production time; only unplanned stops reduce Availability. It's the A in OEE.
- MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) — the average length of an unplanned stop.
- MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) — running time divided by the number of unplanned stops.
- Estimated cost — unplanned minutes × the cost per hour you enter for each machine. A rough estimate is enough.
Hover over any KPI title on the Dashboard to see its formula in the workbook itself.
Starter Reason Codes
The Setup sheet ships with ten reason codes, each already marked as planned or unplanned. Rename or extend them to match your equipment — 8 to 15 codes are usually enough:
- Unplanned: Mechanical breakdown, Electrical breakdown, Tool breakage, Material shortage, Operator unavailable, Quality issue.
- Planned: Changeover / setup, Planned maintenance, Cleaning, No orders.
Ready to Start Tracking?
Download the free Excel template and start logging your first shift today.
By submitting you agree to receive occasional emails about downtime tracking from hopit. Unsubscribe anytime. See our Privacy Policy.
When Excel Starts to Hide the Truth
A manual log is the right first step — it's honest about that. But it inherently misses the losses that happen too fast, or too often, for anyone to write down:
- Micro-stops: The template recommends logging stops of five minutes or more. A 15-second jam won't make it in — but 20 of those a shift is 5 minutes lost every hour.
- Forgotten stops: Downtime during high-pressure moments is often simply never written down.
- Subjective coding: Reasons get simplified or misclassified when operators are rushed.
Read the full guide to machine downtime tracking for the complete picture, or see how automatic downtime tracking software closes the gap entirely.