Why use contribution instead of sales revenue?

Contribution removes the variable costs avoided when sales are lost. Gross revenue would overstate the financial loss.

Should idle payroll be added?

Add only incremental payroll outside the contribution calculation. Wages that remain unchanged are not automatically an additional outage expense.

The same recorded loss is divided by fewer hours. Fixed restart charges can make short interruptions expensive per hour.

The event ledger remains visible, but an hourly rate requires a positive duration.

Maintenance & Reliability calculator

Measure the average cost of each stopped hour. Enter one event duration, lost contribution and separate incremental labor and restart charges.

Calculate an outage loss rate from a recorded event ledger and matching stopped hours.

Recorded Outage Duration: Stop log duration covering the same event as these losses.
Lost Contribution: Lost sales contribution after subtracting variable costs avoided during downtime.
Additional Outage Labor: Incremental labor expense excluded from the lost contribution amount.
Restart and Recovery Charges: Recorded restart, scrap and recovery charges outside other entries.

Best suited to outage cost reconciliation, comparable stop comparison.
Recoverable production should not be valued as permanently lost sales. This observed average does not predict the cost of every future hour. Positive durations below 0.000001 hour are outside this model’s supported range.

U.S. manufacturing runs at 75.7% of capacity (Federal Reserve, Aug 2026). New factory orders are up 8.5% year over year (Census).

Why use contribution instead of sales revenue? Contribution removes the variable costs avoided when sales are lost. Gross revenue would overstate the financial loss.
Should idle payroll be added? Add only incremental payroll outside the contribution calculation. Wages that remain unchanged are not automatically an additional outage expense.
Why does a shorter event raise the hourly average? The same recorded loss is divided by fewer hours. Fixed restart charges can make short interruptions expensive per hour.
What happens at zero outage duration? The event ledger remains visible, but an hourly rate requires a positive duration.

Last reviewed 2026-10-06.