Downtime as a Key Performance Indicator has become a crucial parameter to track in more and more parks around the world. In response to this and per high demand from clients, Mobaro Park has now developed as an integrated part of their Safety & Maintenance Management solution a function to register and document full operational time and downtime on Amusement rides.
Parks invest in new rides each year to get that necessary market value in order to attract more visitors and to sustain or grow their market share. This involves considerable marketing investments and will attract excited guests with high expectations for that particular new ride. However, we all know that with something new, often follows startup problems, adjustments and familiarization. This may involve downtime on the new and highly expected ride, and you may ask yourself what the financial impact is as a result by this and at the consequence of negative guest experiences as their high expectations are not met because the ride is closed. “In order to be able to estimate this, the park will need to track the downtime and causes throughout the ride’s operational time and this is, amongst other uses for downtime tracking, exactly what we have tried to capture with this new feature in the Mobaro Park System”, explains Jens Holm-Møller, Director and Co-founder at Mobaro Park.
According to Hugo Loyola Maureira, Maintenance Manager at Fantasilandia Amusement Park in Chile, their park tracks downtime in order to monitor “the effective time” on operation for each ride on each day in operation, and to break down the downtime structure into the underlaying causes.
Furthermore, Hugo has high expectations for Mobaro’s new solution in the future. “Our expectation in the short term is to use the “Downtime” as a Key Performance Indicator and be able to determine the MTBF (mean time between fails) and MTTR (mean time to repair). In the long term, all this data given by Mobaro Park will be used to calculate the OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness)”.
At the Danish amusement park Djurs Sommerland they have dedicated focus on what they refer to as up-time. “Instead of calling it downtime, we like to keep a positive approach and instead focus on calling it up-time or in other words the full operational time. We know that having closed rides will have a direct impact on our guests’ overall experience in our park and satisfaction towards our park. So, we have previously used significant resources in order to manually track and calculate the up-time on each ride, thus the new Mobaro Park feature is a major help by tracking it digitally and in a more structured and automated sense”, explains Michael B. Nielsen, Director and owner at Djurs Sommerland.
According to Michael, by journalizing the direct causes of the downtime events it gives them the opportunity to work systematically with these causes, which will ultimately help them work more proactively and increase the total park up-time. “Our expectations for this new function are that we will now be able to react faster and have a more real-time instant follow up. Also, a really important benefit of this new function is that when the operator closes, or locks down, a ride in the Mobaro system, they will not be able and allowed to open and operate it again until the task is resolved by a technician”.
Jens Holm-Møller is very satisfied with this new and necessary feature which is an important step to reach Mobaro’s ultimate goal of helping the Attractions Industry become even safer than it is today. “You might say that our clients are our most crucial developers at Mobaro Park. We use significant amount of resources to integrate our clients’ demands and brilliant ideas into our system, and with the new “downtime and operational” time feature we have taken the first steps into a highly relevant and critical function that we will continue developing on and perfect.”.
Mobaro Park is a Danish company developed in collaboration with attractions to specifically fit the needs of the attractions industry. They provide a turnkey digital and mobile solution, that to this day has helped more than 40 large and small attractions (Amusement Parks, Water Parks, Zoos etc.) worldwide enhance their safety efforts and compliance, as well as maintenance and operational management – removing the often slow and heavy processes of working with paper checklists and documentation.