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When the Floor Stops: IT Failures in Manufacturing

When the Floor Stops: IT Failures in Manufacturing

Your production line doesn't care about your IT architecture. It cares about one thing: is the system up?

When the ERP crashes mid-shift, when the barcode scanners lose connectivity, when the floor supervisors can't pull work orders—that's not an IT problem. That's a production problem. And production problems have dollar amounts attached.

The pattern we keep seeing

Manufacturing IT infrastructure tends to follow a recognizable lifecycle:

Phase 1: It works. The ERP was installed five years ago. The network was set up by the VAR. Everything works well enough, so nobody touches it.

Phase 2: It drifts. Small changes accumulate. Someone adds a Wi-Fi access point. A software update shifts a database path. A switch gets replaced with whatever was available. Nobody documents any of it.

Phase 3: It breaks. One of those undocumented changes creates a cascade failure. The IT person (singular) starts troubleshooting, but they can't find the root cause because there's no baseline to compare against.

Phase 4: It gets patched. The immediate problem gets fixed—usually by restarting something. But the underlying drift remains. The cycle resets.

This is brownfield infrastructure. It's not broken. It's fragile.

What makes manufacturing environments different

Uptime windows are narrow. You can't take down the ERP at 2pm on a Tuesday.

Legacy systems are load-bearing. That Windows Server 2012 box running the MES integration? It can't be upgraded because the vendor went out of business.

The network is physical. Floor workers need hardwired connections to scanners, printers, scales, and PLCs. A network outage on the floor is a shutdown.

Nobody owns it. The plant manager thinks IT handles it. IT thinks the ERP vendor handles it. The ERP vendor thinks the MSP handles it.

What stabilization means here

  • Dependency mapping. Which systems depend on which? When the domain controller goes down, what else fails?
  • Baseline configuration. What does "working correctly" look like?
  • Tested recovery. Can you restore the ERP from backup? How long does it take?
  • Change control. Every change gets logged, reviewed, and reversible.

If your floor has experienced recurring system failures, the Infrastructure Health Check gives you a clear picture of where you stand.

How fragile is your environment?Take the 2-minute self-assessment and see your risk profile.