This may feel like a cop-out, but the honest answer is there isn’t one. This because the true cost of unplanned ELAU PacDrive downtime can vary significantly depending on the site, its size and production output.
To put this into perspective, consider the scale of FMCG production. A single canning line can produce up to 120,000 units per hour, whilst Mars’ Slough factory produces nearly three million Mars bars per day. At that scale, incident costs and hourly losses are only part of the story. The true impact of downtime caused by equipment failure can extend far beyond the immediate repair, affecting production schedules, recovery time, product availability, customer fulfilment and the wider business.
As a result, instead of asking, “What does downtime cost on average?”, the better question is:
“What does this line lose for every hour it is stopped and what additional costs does this specific incident trigger?”
Why Traditional Downtime Calculations Often Fall Short
The temptation is to calculate the true cost of unplanned ELAU PacDrive downtime using three familiar figures: the hourly labour cost, the engineer’s invoice and the cost of any replacement component(s). However, whilst these matter, they can miss:
- production value interrupted and contribution which cannot be recovered
- scrap, work in progress and packaging loss
- disrupted labour and any overtime needed to recover production
- specialist support, replacement parts and urgent logistics
- restart and stabilisation time
- downstream disruption, delayed deliveries and customer consequences where applicable
These won’t necessarily be exhaustive and will vary according to the site and circumstances of the breakdown. For example, if legacy equipment such as PacDrive M is involved, sourcing replacement parts may be harder due to limited availability.
Unplanned downtime can therefore affect far more than engineering, extending into production, quality, finance and commercial operations.
Worked Example: One Hour to Repair, 2.5 Hours of Production Loss
The example below uses a high-speed line rate to show the scale more realistically. All commercial values are illustrative; the real figures should come from the manufacturer’s own production, finance and maintenance data.
| What to calculate | Illustrative value | Where your figure should come from |
| Line output | 120,000 units/hour | Site production data |
| Illustrative net value | £0.50/unit | Commercial / finance data |
| Contribution margin | 18% | Finance data |
| Technical fault + repair | 1.0 hour | Maintenance history |
| Restart + stabilisation | 1.5 hours | Production history |
| Total production-loss window | 2.5 hours | Fault to stable output |
| Production recovered later | 60% | Planning / capacity review |
| Scrap + WIP | £2,500 | Incident / historical data |
| Disrupted labour | £900 | Payroll + shift review |
| Specialist support | £1,200 | Actual support cost |
| Parts + urgent logistics | £500 | Actual incident cost |
| Recovery overtime | £1,800 | Production recovery plan |
The Hard Number
| PRODUCTION VALUE INTERRUPTED £150,000 120,000 units × £0.50 × 2.5 hours. This shows the value of production flow affected – not automatic lost profit. | ESTIMATED DIRECT INCIDENT COST £17,700 £10,800 potential contribution loss + £6,900 scrap, labour, support, parts/logistics and recovery overtime. |
How is the £17,700 derived? If 60% of the £150,000 interrupted production can be recovered, £60,000 remains unrecovered. At an illustrative 18% contribution margin, £10,800 of contribution is at risk. Adding £6,900 of direct incident and recovery costs gives an estimated event cost of £17,700.
Why show both figures? £150,000 shows the scale of production affected; £17,700 estimates the direct financial consequence. Treating the whole £150,000 as lost profit would overstate the event, whilst looking only at the repair cost would understate it.
Why Recovery Time Changes the Arithmetic
Using the same illustrative production value of £60,000 per hour:
| Total production-loss window | Production value interrupted |
| 1 hour | £60,000 |
| 2.5 hours | £150,000 |
| 8 hours | £480,000 |
| 24 hours | £1,440,000 |
The commercial objective is not simply to repair the fault. It is to reduce the time between the first fault and the first stable, saleable product.
What Determines How Long a PacDrive Breakdown Lasts?
| What drives the downtime | What reduces the exposure |
| Diagnosis | PacDrive-specific diagnostics and trained first response |
| Replacement hardware | Tested, hardware- and firmware-compatible spares |
| Configuration | Verified backups, parameters and software |
| Escalation | Clear support route and remote access |
| Developing faults | Condition and event monitoring |
A spare is only useful if it is compatible. With PacDrive, hardware, firmware, backups, parameters and machine configuration can determine whether a replacement actually returns the line to service. For PacDrive M, this becomes increasingly important as the platform reaches the end of its serviceable life.
So, What Is an Hour Worth on Your Line?
There is no universal answer. An hour may interrupt £5,000 of production on one machine and more than £100,000 on another.
However, what matters is:
- the value passing through the equipment each hour
- how much lost production can realistically be recovered
- how quickly stable production can be restored
Once those numbers are known, the value of spares, training, diagnostics, condition monitoring and specialist support becomes much easier to assess.
The question is no longer “What does support cost?” It is “What is one additional hour of downtime worth?”
DMC supports ELAU PacDrive M and PacDrive 3 users with diagnostics, training, compatible spares, repair, obsolescence planning and Machine Analyser® condition monitoring.
The aim: reduce the time between the first fault and the first stable, saleable product.
All financial examples are illustrative and should be replaced with the manufacturer’s own operational and financial data.