Downtime Can Severely Impact How You Do Business

Moving to online business means your organization needs to be readily accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. When your business experiences even just minutes of downtime, you could lose out on more than just revenue. Downtime impacts your company’s reputation as well.

In the business world, downtime is any period when your business or its production comes to a halt. This can be caused by many things, whether they be intentional or unintentional. In either scenario, knowing how to navigate through periods of downtime can help minimize any negative impact.

Companies can sometimes panic when unplanned downtime occurs. This may be because of hardware or software failure, human error, malicious attacks, or even natural disasters. Preventing the unexpected is difficult, but if your company has a plan, then it can resolve the issue and end the period of downtime more quickly.

Planned downtime is expected, scheduled, and necessary. There is more control over periods of planned downtime, which may ensure systems, applications and servers are functioning at optimal capacity. This is done through maintenance, inspection, and testing. Planned downtime usually occurs on holidays, weekends or after hours, that way normal business operations are not interrupted. 

Downtime costs can vary based on the size of your business and the duration of downtime. It should be clear that longer periods of downtime will cost more and more as that time goes on. Business opportunities and sales will hurt during downtime, especially these days in a digital world where everybody is connected. 

When a customer has a bad experience during downtime, it will affect the way they feel about your company. A damaged brand image could lead to more and more unhappy customers, and it can make gaining the trust of new customers more difficult. A single downtime event could make your business less reliable, and multiple phases of downtime means losing customers, and losing revenue.

Your company is also impacted by downtime in the way of productivity losses. When your employees lose access to the network, email, or cloud applications, productivity can come to a grinding halt until the services are restored. Employees become involuntarily idle, and they must wait out downtime before regaining access to the essential applications they need.

Combating downtime is tough on its own, so you need to be well-prepared during times of both planned and unplanned downtime. Developing the right plans and strategies to make a more efficient experience of downtime can make a large impact on your business’ success.. For more information on how downtime impacts your business, and on formulating strategies to minimize downtime, call Cybergear today at (586) 531-7116. 

Because our mission is to help our clients improve, we treat your capital as if it were our own. By combining lean and factory physics concepts with digital manufacturing, Cybergear helps manufacturers remain adaptable in a constantly changing industry by increasing quality, efficiency, and ultimately—profits.