Investing in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to protect your critical systems is commonplace for data centers. It’s an industry that simply cannot fathom the idea of a power outage disrupting daily operations. Today, the same applies to other industries as well, such as semiconductor, additive manufacturing (3D printing) and health care applications such as diagnostic imaging equipment. Any downtime due to power failure can compromise an entire production batch, damage expensive equipment, delay customer service and hurt a company’s credibility. These are all big prices to pay for being at risk of power problems. 

To mitigate these interruptions and protect investment, facility operators will deploy a UPS to provide clean power and backup energy storage. Whether a UPS is a good investment for industrial, manufacturing or health care facilities comes down  to a simple calculation: how much does the UPS cost, compared with how much it’s going to save the facility over time?  With these two facts, we can calculate return on investment (ROI) for the UPS.

Take for example an additive manufacturing facility, where the cost associated with lost time and material due to a power failure is approximately $40,000 per 3D printing machine.  A good-sized facility might operate 15 or more of these machines, resulting in a cost of more than $600,000 per power incident. The cost of a UPS to protect the 3D printers is approximately $100,000 with installation, maintenance and operating costs possibly doubling that after a year.

But, if that UPS protects the facility from one power failure, it will have saved the operator $400,000 — twice the UPS total cost. Losses associated with other types of manufacturing such as semiconductors or pharmaceuticals can be even higher, making the case for a UPS even easier. For more information and a more detailed look at this example, please visit http://www.activepower.com/white-paper-122/.

If you haven’t already, put pen to paper to calculate all of the potential hard and soft costs to your organization due to a power disruption. Then, take a step back and look at the list. If the list of items and costs are tough to digest, it could be high time to consider deploying an UPS to protect your investment and possibly even your job.