The Roller Coaster Effect of Downtime
Downtime can wreak havoc on your entire business. It doesn’t matter if you are an OEM or a supply chain producer, unexpected disruptions cause you to lose money with idle workers, miss delivery deadlines, lose customer confidence and lose revenue. However, some manufacturing downtime is necessary and should be scheduled to reduce effects on profitability; such as machine maintenance, re-tooling, and inventory/restocking stages.
While plant floor machinery will usually run on it’s own dedicated machine control system, crucial systems link enterprise-wide business applications for financial, inventory and logistics applications. Any IT-related issue can directly affect manufacturing operations.
How IT Managed Services Can Help
The unforeseen and often disastrous downtime associated with IT issues can be minimized and often avoided with proactively-managed installations and a definitive disaster recovery plan.
Three ways to reduce IT related downtime that may affect manufacturing:
- A combined IT management team and help desk service that incorporates the complexities of both the manufacturing and business side of your operations and network is crucial. Human error can drastically affect system performance; having a help desk in place will keep employees up and running.
- Data security protection against outside malware or internal system errors, embedded into every aspect of your network will ensure the integrity of your information systems.
- A backup recovery plan that includes off-site storage or cloud backup, along with an implementation plan will ensure your systems get back up and running with nominal effect on business.
IT-related downtime doesn’t have to be a threat for your manufacturing operations. By implementing these three features to manufacturing IT systems, you can drastically reduce your downtime.