The Hidden Cost of Equipment Downtime in Mining

How Much Does Equipment Downtime Cost?

ABB’s 2023 Value of Reliability survey of 3,215 plant-maintenance decision-makers found that the typical industrial business reported a median unplanned-downtime cost of approximately US$125,000 per hour.

ABB’s Canadian release reported approximately C$242,000 per hour for Canadian respondents.

They illustrate an important point, however: the economic consequence of an outage can rapidly exceed the direct cost of repairing the failed component.

ABB also reported that more than two-thirds of surveyed industrial businesses experienced unplanned outages at least once a month. In the same research, maintenance and reliability were closely connected with uptime, financial performance and operational continuity.

What Could 24 Hours of Downtime Really Mean?

Consider a simplified scenario.

A production-critical loader or excavator is taken out of service after a bucket or attachment develops a structural crack.

Before returning the machine to operation, the site may need to:

• identify and assess the damage;
• determine whether the equipment can continue operating;
• locate the applicable drawing or repair procedure;
• mobilize a qualified repair team;
• obtain necessary parts or consumables;
• complete the repair;
• inspect and verify the work; and
• approve the asset’s return to service.

If the full interruption lasts 24 hours, mechanically applying ABB’s broad industrial median would represent US$3.0 million of theoretical downtime exposure:

24 hours × US$125,000/hour = US$3.0 million

This does not mean that a bucket failure costs a mine US$3 million per day.

A mine-specific calculation must consider production rate, commodity value, stockpiles, equipment redundancy, bottlenecks and the operational role of the affected machine.

The example simply demonstrates why even a fraction of a large industrial downtime rate can make prevention and faster maintenance decisions economically important.

Why Equipment Availability Matters in Mining

Mining operations are particularly sensitive to equipment availability because material movement operates as a connected system.

Loading, hauling, crushing and processing depend on one another. A problem affecting one production-critical asset can therefore have consequences elsewhere in the operation.

McKinsey’s mining research identifies truck availability as an important maintenance-performance measure and notes that hauling can become a production bottleneck with a significant effect on cost.

In another mining example, McKinsey reported that a large North American open-pit mine used advanced analytics to improve haul-truck maintenance. Within six months, the mine achieved 12% savings in labor, services and spare parts while improving equipment availability by 5%.

The broader lesson goes beyond analytics: maintenance improves when useful asset information is captured and converted into timely decisions.

How Fragmented Equipment History Can Add to Downtime

Many mining companies, OEMs, dealers and maintenance organizations already collect substantial amounts of equipment information.

The challenge is often not whether the information exists.

It is whether the right person can find it when it matters.

A manufacturing record may remain with the OEM. A drawing may be stored in a document-management system. An inspection photograph may be on someone’s phone. A repair report may be buried in an email. Operating information may sit with the asset owner or dealer.

Each individual record exists, yet reconstructing the complete history of one physical asset can still be difficult.

This becomes particularly important when time is limited.

Before repairing a fatigue crack, for example, a maintenance or engineering team may want to know:

• Has this location cracked before?
• How many operating hours have accumulated since the previous repair?
• Was this weld previously treated?
• Which repair procedure was used?
• Are photographs available from the previous inspection?
• Which material and drawing revision apply?
• Who performed and verified the previous work?

When answering these questions requires multiple phone calls, inbox searches or disconnected systems, information retrieval itself becomes part of downtime.

This is one of the problems RYONX is being developed to address: maintaining continuity around the history of an individual physical asset throughout its working life.

From Preventive Maintenance to Lifecycle Traceability

Preventive and predictive maintenance become more useful when information has context.

McKinsey describes digital maintenance and reliability tools as a way for asset-intensive industries—including mining and metals—to predict and prevent failures, improve labor productivity and manage maintenance more effectively.

Digital tools, however, create value only when the underlying information is usable.

A digital equipment identity can provide continuity.

Instead of treating every inspection, repair or maintenance activity as an isolated event, a unique identity attached to the physical asset can connect information throughout its lifecycle.

A simplified lifecycle could look like:

The information generated at each stage can remain associated with the same physical equipment.

What Is a Digital Equipment Passport?

A digital equipment passport is a persistent digital identity associated with an individual physical asset.

For heavy equipment and mining attachments, that identity can connect information such as:

• manufacturing and equipment information;
• model and serial number;
• drawings and technical documents;
• site and operating environment;
• operating hours;
• inspection history;
• photographs;
• reported issues and damage;
• maintenance and repairs;
• post-weld treatments;
• responsible personnel and verification; and
• subsequent field performance.

Instead of reconstructing this information after a problem occurs, the lifecycle record develops alongside the equipment.

What Can a Digital Equipment Passport Contribute?

Where RYONX Fits

RYONX is being developed as a digital equipment passport and lifecycle traceability platform for heavy equipment and mining attachments.

A unique RYONX identity connects the physical asset with its manufacturing, ownership, operating, inspection, maintenance and field-performance history.

The objective is to create continuity between parties that interact with the same equipment during different stages of its working life.

Technologies such as High-Frequency Mechanical Impact (HFMI) treatment can be documented when they are used, including treatment and subsequent field history, but the RYONX passport is not dependent on HFMI or any single maintenance or treatment technology.

RYONX is also not intended to claim that software eliminates equipment failure.

It cannot.

The practical objective is simpler:

When a decision has to be made, the people responsible for an asset should have a clearer record of what the equipment is, what it has experienced, what has been done to it and what happened afterward.

The Bigger Reliability Question

Unplanned downtime will always be part of mining.

Components wear. Structures fatigue. Operating conditions change. Unexpected damage occurs.

The opportunity is to reduce avoidable downtime and make unavoidable maintenance faster, better informed and more repeatable.

When the economic value of uptime is high, relatively small improvements in prevention, diagnosis and repair turnaround can matter.

That makes equipment history more than documentation.

Properly structured, it can become an operating asset of its own—connecting the OEM, service organization and asset owner around the same physical equipment throughout its working life.

Frequently Asked Questions