NEWS 8 HYDRAULICS & PNEUMATICS November/December 2025 www.hpmag.co.uk The research, conducted by Censuswide on behalf of Fluke, surveyed more than 600 senior decision-makers and maintenance professionals across the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. It found that 68% of UK manufacturers suffered unplanned downtime in the past 12 months, revealing what Fluke describes as a “silent crisis” in operational reliability. The study shows that downtime is both frequent and prolonged. Nearly half (46%) of UK respondents reported between six and ten downtime incidents each week, while 15% said they experience 11 to 20 incidents weekly. In terms of duration, 45% said outages last up to 12 hours, and 17% reported incidents stretching to as long as 72 hours. At an average cost of £1.36 million per hour, a single incident could result in losses of up to £49 million – equivalent to powering 3900 factories for a week. While the frequency and duration of downtime are similar across the three countries surveyed, the cost impact is notably higher in the UK and Germany. In both markets, a single incident can cost up to £49 million, compared with a global average of £1.27 million per hour and £31.9 million per incident. The research indicates that downtime is a global operational challenge and a board-level risk to profitability and resilience. However, it also suggests that UK manufacturers face significantly higher costs than their US counterparts, pointing to what Fluke calls a critical gap in Europe’s industrial resilience. The problem is particularly acute among large enterprises. Globally, 40% of organisations with more than 50,000 employees reported experiencing between 11 and 20 downtime incidents each week, and half said these incidents lasted up to 72 hours. Despite the scale of the issue, Fluke’s findings show that the manufacturing sector’s response remains fragmented. UK manufacturers are distributing digital investments across several technologies aimed at improving resilience, including predictive maintenance (12%), digital twins (12%), and condition monitoring (13%). Parker Burke, Group President at Fluke, said: “Our research paints a sobering picture: manufacturers are caught in a cycle where downtime eats directly into competitiveness, and too many are stuck with fragmented fixes. “The data makes clear that the frequency, duration, and cost of downtime expose systemic vulnerabilities in maintenance and reliability strategies. What once was viewed as an operational inconvenience has become a risk to enterprise value. Without a clear path to scale digital investments, manufacturers’ efforts risk being spread too thin to deliver meaningful resilience or return.” He added: “The findings underscore the urgent need for manufacturers to rethink reliability not as a maintenance issue, but as a boardroom priority critical to growth, competitiveness, and customer trust.” S&A Academy, a leading UK training and apprenticeship provider, has issued a stark warning that the predicted business growth in the UK economy is at serious risk of “tanking”. The alert comes amid a perfect storm of severe skills shortages in artificial infrastructure services. The warning follows new projections from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which recently stated that the UK is expected to be the second-fastest growing of the world’s most advanced economies this year. The IMF forecasts that in 2025 the UK economy will outperform other G7 nations apart from the US. However, it also predicts that the UK will experience the highest rate of inflation in the G7 in both 2025 and 2026. National apprenticeships and commercial training provider S&A Academy has cautioned that this economic optimism could be undermined by a growing digital transformation bottleneck. As more companies accelerate data integration and adopt AI and Generative AI technologies, the lack of qualified professionals has become a significant UK digital skills shortage could derail economic growth, warns training provider intelligence (AI) and data, set against the backdrop of rapidly developing digital transformation programmes across British businesses. The company warns that the shortage poses a serious threat not only to productivity and supply chains but also to national
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