Dictionary · Manufacturing
Micro-stop
A micro-stop (Nakajima: “idling and minor stoppages”) is a production stop of seconds to a couple of minutes — a jam cleared by hand, a sensor re-triggered, a feed topped up. Individually trivial, collectively one of the two Performance losses in OEE.
Lost units = Run time × Rated speed − Actual output
Micro-stops are structurally invisible: too short for the downtime log, too routine for anyone to mention, absent from every meeting. They surface only in the arithmetic gap between what the line should have produced at rated speed and what it did.
Sources: Nakajima (1988)
Reading it on the floor
Detection without sensors
You don't need instrumentation to find micro-stops — you need the gap math above, per shift, per line. The gap is micro-stops plus slow cycles; if it's material, then instrument.
First lever
One shift of manual tally at the worst station beats a month of debate. A clipboard and a tick per stop, with a one-word reason. The distribution is usually brutally concentrated: two or three causes own most of the ticks.
The trap
Treating each micro-stop as too small to matter. Thirty six-second stops an hour is 3% of the hour — permanently, silently, on the one rate (Performance) nobody watches.
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