Cost of downtime
Quick answer
The total loss from each hour a critical system or process is unavailable: missed sales, blocked work, penalties.
Key takeaways
- Revenue lost / hour (unprocessed orders × average value)
- Cost of blocked labor (FTE × cost/hour × affected hours)
- SLA penalties and chargebacks
- Recovery and reprocessing cost
What cost of downtime is
Cost of downtime quantifies what you lose for every hour (or minute) a critical system - ERP, integration, order portal - is down: unprocessed orders, blocked teams, missed SLAs, penalties and frustrated customers.
Why it matters to the board
Downtime is often invisible in the budget until a major incident. Quantified, it becomes one of the strongest arguments for redundancy, monitoring and resilient integrations.
How to calculate it
- Revenue lost / hour (unprocessed orders × average value)
- Cost of blocked labor (FTE × cost/hour × affected hours)
- SLA penalties and chargebacks
- Recovery and reprocessing cost
How CRMconnect helps
CRMconnect uses idempotent integrations, automatic retry and durable queues, so a temporarily unavailable ERP does not block the flow: orders accumulate and process on recovery, with no loss and no duplicates.
Real-world example
For a distributor with 800 orders/day at €180 average, one hour of peak downtime can mean tens of thousands in delayed orders - the clear argument for resilient integrations.
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Frequently asked
Why calculate cost of downtime?+
To justify investing in resilience: monitoring, redundancy, retry-based integrations. Without a figure, the risk stays underestimated until an incident.
How do I reduce cost of downtime?+
Through idempotent integrations with retry and queues, proactive monitoring, and decoupling systems so one failure doesn't block the whole flow.
Where CRMconnect fits
Related terms
SLA (Service Level Agreement)
Contractual guarantee of availability, support response time and technical performance.
TechnologyIdempotency (integrations)
The property whereby processing the same message repeatedly produces the same result, with no duplicate effects.
TechnologyControl tower (supply chain)
A single visibility and decision hub that aggregates chain-wide data to detect and resolve issues proactively.
TechnologyReal-time vs batch syncing
The two ways of moving data between systems: instantly on each event, or grouped at scheduled intervals.