Voluntary logging leaks. Interlocking does not.
After a qualifying stop, cycle-start is held until a reason is entered. Reason coverage stops being a matter of discipline and becomes a property of the system.
Voluntary downtime logging leaks. Busy shifts skip entries, and the Pareto quietly becomes a partial record that looks complete — which is worse than an obviously incomplete one, because decisions get made on it.
Interlocking closes that gap mechanically: after a qualifying stop, cycle-start is held until a reason is entered, then released. Reason coverage stops being a matter of discipline and becomes a property of the system.
The interlock gates cycle-start only. Emergency stops, safety circuits and machine guarding are never in the loop and are not affected in any way.
Interlocking is not appropriate everywhere.
It adds a few seconds to every qualifying restart. On a machine with many short, legitimate stops that friction is real and the floor will feel it, which is why the duration threshold matters — set it so that only stops worth explaining trigger the prompt, and review the setting after a fortnight rather than fixing it at commissioning.
A supervisor override exists and is itself logged, because a system with no escape valve gets bypassed physically, which is worse than an override you can audit. If override usage climbs, that is a finding in its own right: either the threshold is wrong or the reason tree does not contain the words the floor needs.
Where interlocking is not appropriate, voluntary capture at a kiosk or by QR scan remains, and coverage is then a supervision question rather than a system property. Both approaches are described on the downtime reasons capture page.
A Pareto with a large 'other'
Partial capture concentrates in the easy categories. Breakdowns get logged; waiting, material and setup overruns do not, so the Pareto systematically understates exactly the losses that are most fixable.
Every qualifying stop has a cause
The ranking becomes trustworthy, and the largest bar is usually not the one the morning meeting had been discussing.
MTTR and MTBF become computable
Per machine, without a separate maintenance record, because the events and their durations are already captured accurately.
Arguments end
A stop with a timestamp, a duration and a reason entered at the machine is difficult to dispute in a way that a shift-end recollection never was.
The interlock runs on a MachineWise device wired at the machine. It needs the machine's start circuit routed through it, which is an electrical change scheduled around a planned stop, and it needs your reason tree designed before it goes live — because an interlock prompting from a taxonomy the floor does not recognise will be overridden from day one.
We would normally suggest running voluntary capture first for a fortnight, reviewing what coverage you actually get and what reasons operators reach for, and then interlocking the machines where the gap is material. Interlocking everything on day one is technically simple and usually the wrong sequence.
The commercial and analytical context is on the downtime monitoring system page.