November 06, 2025
If you've ever walked into your office on a Monday and
asked "What broke while I was gone?" you're not alone. In mid-sized
manufacturing, the real cost of IT pauses isn't just machines sitting—it's
trust eroded, missed shipments, and spreadsheets that don't close.
We recently spoke with a finance leader at a mid-sized
parts manufacturer. They had a complex ERP and a decent security stack. But one
patch—just one—didn't get applied. Weeks later, a routine vendor login
exploited that gap. They lost full server access for four hours. By the time
backup switched over, they'd lost data, delayed two big orders, and incurred a
nearly $90,000 hit in expedited production and late-fee penalties.
"The best time to repair a roof is when the sun is
shining—not while you're holding a bucket." — Warren Buffett
That story isn't rare. In the August 2025 issue of DataCalculus
Monthly, writer Allen Reddick shared how thousands of network-connected
devices in electronics and appliance plants were going unpatched for weeks,
even months—essentially inviting problems into production. "Unpatched systems,"
he wrote, "are like open doors in a building full of moving parts."
In the September edition of Forbes Tech Council,
James Johnson noted that "68% of audit delays in manufacturing aren't due to
non-compliance, but to lagging updates, weak logging, and stale documentation."
The trouble, he pointed out, isn't what you did wrong—it's what you didn't get
around to fixing.
Here's what this means for someone like you:
· One
patch missed = machines idle while IT, finance, and ops scramble.
· One
patch missed = you at the board meeting answering for why the budget cost more
this month.
· One
patch missed = competing to meet delivery deadlines while your peers stay
ahead.
Questions to ask your team now:
· What
devices are one patch behind—and who owns that list?
· When
was the last time we tested recovery from a firmware-level exploit?
· Are
we tracking production loss tied to IT faults (not just machine faults)?
· How
much did we spend last year fixing preventable IT issues? Could that budget
have led to a new machine or hiring another operator?
Checklist of red flags we see in mid-sized plants:
· Production
control PCs without patch reports
· Shadow
IT operations connecting directly to the network
· Vendor
access tokens never audited
· No
downtime cost tracking tied to IT failures
· Months-old
alerts in the IT queue with no escalation path
If you walked out of your office today and asked, "What
patch do I owe my team?" and there was no answer—you're carrying risk you don't
need to. And you're doing it in silence.
Interested in a conversation or want to learn more? Contact us here.
Call us or email michaelmoran@aresgrp.com.
