Recording a stop is not data yet, only a fact. The value is in the reason: that is what lets you build a maintenance plan, a setup rule or a purchasing decision.
Why the reason gets left out
The usual pattern is that the PLC detects the stop while a person is expected to type in the reason. The shift has no time to fill in a form at the machine, so in the end every stop lands in the database under the same "other" label.
Three things help:
- a small set of clearly distinguishable categories, so choosing takes seconds;
- reporting from the machine, on a phone, rather than reconstructing it at the end of the shift;
- capturing the reason and the lost minutes together, because nobody remembers the minutes afterwards.
What pays off later
Once the reasons are clean, a few months are enough to see which machine, which station and which shift produce the loss. That makes prioritisation possible: fixing the biggest item is usually simpler than replacing the whole line.