Driftsstans

Driftsstans refers to a temporary halt in the operation of a facility, production line, or infrastructure. The term is used in Swedish and Nordic industrial contexts to describe a break in normal production or service delivery. Driftsstans can be planned, for example to perform preventive maintenance, inspections, calibration, or upgrades, or unplanned, resulting from mechanical failures, software faults, safety incidents, supply shortages, or external disruptions such as weather.

Duration and scope vary from brief pauses to multi-day shutdowns. In energy, manufacturing, and public transportation, driftsstans are tracked to analyze reliability and availability. They contribute to downtime metrics and affect productivity, maintenance costs, and service levels. Economic impact depends on duration, production mix, and inventory buffers; safety and regulatory compliance may also drive stoppages.

Management and mitigation emphasize preventive maintenance, condition monitoring, redundancy, and robust design. Techniques include predictive maintenance, scheduled maintenance planning, root cause analysis of failures, and contingency planning. Accurate recording of downtime events, causes, and recovery times is essential for performance reporting and for identifying improvement opportunities. Some organizations use formal downtime indicators such as mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).

In practice, driftsstans is a normal aspect of operating life in complex systems. Effective management reduces duration and frequency, minimizes indirect costs, and supports safe and reliable operation.