Stoppage analysis

Augos classifies every halt on a production line as one of three kinds of stop: planned stops, unplanned stops and interruptions. Interruptions (what standard OEE calls minor stops or micro-stops) are the short halts nobody records; standard OEE leaves them inside Performance, where they hide root causes. Augos measures them as their own stop loss, so they can be counted, ranked, owned and recovered.

Reviewed 2 October 2026 · Author: Tim Stevens, Augos · Method: Augos Factory canonical method

Three kinds of stop

A stop is any event in which the line halts and restarts. Traditional OEE splits stops into planned and unplanned, and both become Availability loss. The small stops in between are usually not recorded at all, so they are assumed to be part of Performance loss, blended with slow running as "small stops and idling". That blurs speed and interruptions together and gives no clear picture of the impact of either: a line that runs fast but stutters looks identical, in a Performance figure, to a line that is simply slow, and the two need opposite fixes.

Augos measures true speed, the actual pace of the line while it is running, in real time. Interruptions are taken out of Performance and reported as a measured stop loss of their own. Speed loss then shows only slow running, and interruptions show their true count and impact. That gives three primary stop classifications, the vocabulary the platform and these pages use:

• Planned stops: scheduled events such as changeovers, cleaning and breaks. Split into Planning Efficiency Loss and Operator Discipline.
• Unplanned stops: declared stops such as breakdowns, material starves and waits. Split into the Stoppage Response Stages: Operator Evaluation, Operator Resolution, Technician Response, Active Wrench and Inactive Wrench.
• Interruptions: the short, frequent halts that traditionally go unrecorded. Measured separately from true speed.

Source: Augos Factory method, Glossary: stop classifications

Planned stops

A planned stop is a halt the plant scheduled: a changeover, a clean, a break, a planned maintenance window. It is measured against its standard allowed time rather than broken into stages. The scheduled time belongs to Planning; any overrun beyond the standard belongs to the Operator.

Unplanned stops

An unplanned stop is a halt long enough to be declared and classified: the operator selects a reason on the Augos Operator Terminal, or the reason is inferred from the fault and confirmed. Unplanned stops carry the full Owner column. They are breakdowns, material starves and waits. On the anonymised beverage line used throughout the method pages, one month in 2026 held 534 unplanned stops in 720 paid hours: 17.8 a day, a median of 7 minutes, 230.2 hours in total. Twenty-five of them ran over an hour and accounted for 134 of those hours.

Many unplanned stops are short. On the same line, 171 lasted between two and five minutes and 125 between five and ten, and almost all were cleared by the operator without calling anyone. Individually trivial, together they were 25 hours of the month, and because each one carries a reason code they can be ranked by cause.

Interruptions

An interruption is the traditional small stop: a halt too short to be declared, which is why it usually goes unrecorded and is assumed to be part of Performance loss. Augos measures it instead. Interruptions are owned by the Operator, because operator attention and small adjustments are what prevent most of them.

Interruptions nobody writes down

Most interruptions are the halts nobody writes down: the jam that clears itself, the sensor that trips and resets, the ten-second hesitation at a transfer. The pulse sensor sees them because it counts every machine cycle, so a gap in the pulse train is recorded whether or not anyone noticed. Because true speed is measured separately, these halts do not drag down the speed figure; they appear as their own stop loss, with a count and a total time.

On the beverage line the terminal recorded 13,260 interruptions in the month, averaging about fifteen seconds each: 54.6 hours, 7.6% of paid time, and roughly one every minute and a half of running time. No manual log would have captured a single one. A plant reading this line's Performance figure without the interruption count would conclude it had a slow machine. It had a machine that was never allowed to run.

Source: Augos platform, Downtime Report and Unplanned Stoppage analysis, one anonymised beverage line, a 30-day month in 2026

Thresholds

The boundary between an interruption and an unplanned stop is a duration threshold configured for each site. Augos publishes no single number because the right threshold depends on the process: a bottling line's natural hesitations are seconds long, a mill's are minutes. Two rules hold everywhere. First, the threshold is set once and documented, so the classes mean the same thing from month to month. Second, a lenient threshold hides problems: if a pause only becomes an unplanned stop after five minutes, an operator can clear a chronic fault and restart the line every four minutes forever and the downtime report will show nothing. Read a line's interruption count alongside its threshold before trusting its Availability.

The Pareto, by owner

A Pareto ranks stop causes by total time lost, longest bar first, so effort goes where the hours are. Standard OEE Paretos stop at the cause. Adding the owner shows that the top of the chart is rarely one problem. The beverage line's unplanned Pareto for the month:

Five raw-material waits were 42.5% of the month's unplanned time. Four hundred and seventeen breakdowns were another 43.1%. The first block is a supply and planning conversation and will not improve however fast the technicians run; the second is a maintenance and operator conversation and will not improve however well the supplier delivers. A Pareto without the Owner column puts both at the top of one list and invites the wrong fix for half of it.

Source: Augos platform, Unplanned Stoppage analysis, one anonymised beverage line, a 30-day month in 2026; percentages are of 230.2 unplanned hours

Time between stops

The simplest vital sign of a line is how long it runs, on average, before something halts it. For unplanned stops the platform reports it as MTBF, mean time between failures; on the beverage line it was 81 minutes, with a mean time to repair of 26. Counting interruptions as well, the same line halted about every minute and a half of running time. An Augos study across 12 manufacturing operations and 62 lines found a weighted-average Mean Time Between Interruptions (MTBI) of 1 minute 14 seconds; its most stable cohort ran about 3 minutes 27 seconds between halts and posted a Performance figure 12.5 points higher than its most fragmented one.

Source: The Interruption Whitepaper, Augos, 2026 (12 operations, 62 lines); line figures from the Augos platform, one anonymised beverage line, one month in 2026

Common questions