The #1 thing stealing your plant's capacity isn't what you think.

A: "Unspecified Idle" — machines sitting idle with no reason ever logged — is the single largest loss category across the 508 plants studied, at 29.1% of all loss hours, ahead of equipment failure (16.3%) and setup/changeover (10.9%). The report's core finding is that most plants aren't losing the most time to breakdowns or changeovers — they're losing it to time nobody explained.

A: OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is calculated as Availability × Performance × Quality — the share of scheduled time a machine actually ran, multiplied by how close to full speed it ran, multiplied by the share of output that was good. Across the fleet studied in this report, quality is largely solved (98.2%), while availability (63.4%) is where most recoverable capacity lives.

A: TEEP (Total Effective Equipment Performance) measures output against every hour on the calendar, including hours never scheduled to run, while OEE only measures against scheduled time. Across the plants studied, fleet-wide OEE is 53.7% but TEEP is only 26.3%, because only 48.9% of calendar hours are even scheduled for production in the first place.

A: Published industry estimates put the cost of unplanned downtime at roughly $10,000 to $50,000 or more per hour for a typical discrete manufacturer, higher for automotive, pharma, and continuous-process industries. Because these third-party estimates vary and can be dated, the 2026 Manufacturing Benchmark Report presents its own fleet findings in hours and percentages rather than a single blended dollar figure — you can apply your own plant's cost-per-hour to the report's loss data directly.

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A: No. The 2026 Manufacturing Benchmark Report is built from trailing-12-month, real production data collected from 508 connected plants and 10,636 active machines — 42.9 million hours of actual production — supplemented with third-party industry research for additional context. It is not a self-reported survey.

A: Yes, significantly. Across the six manufacturing verticals studied, automotive plants averaged the highest OEE (71.5%), while food & beverage plants averaged the lowest (45.2%) — a 26-point spread — with each vertical also showing a different dominant loss category (for example, blocking/starving in food & beverage vs. changeover time in packaging and CPG).

A: Not necessarily. In 5 of the 6 manufacturing verticals studied, the highest-volume plants (by production hours) actually ran at a lower OEE than the typical, median-sized plant in that same vertical — most notably in food & beverage and CPG. Scale does not automatically translate into efficiency.

A: Yes — the 2026 Manufacturing Benchmark Report is a free download; you'll be asked for your work email and a few details so Shoplogix can send it to you and follow up with related resources.