July 21, 2025
Most mid-sized manufacturers think
they know what they're spending on IT—but the real costs often hide in plain
sight. They're buried in overtime, shadow IT, surprise outages, and compliance
rework.
The sticker price of your MSP or IT team
is just one piece of the puzzle. The true cost shows up when your team can't
access files, your ERP crashes during month-end close, or your auditor flags a
missing document your system should've caught.
According to Deloitte, 42% of
manufacturers underestimate IT-related expenses by at least 20% when factoring
in downtime, inefficiencies, and compliance gaps.
Here's another factor: response time.
Industry response time averages for external IT partners are often 30-60
minutes, with clear escalation paths. Internal teams—especially lean ones—are
limited by how many arms and hours they have. When "John from IT" is already
on-site fixing a printer, he's not troubleshooting a finance dashboard outage.
Common hidden IT costs CFOs should be
watching:
- Extra hours from finance and ops staff compensating for slow systems
- Premium fees for emergency support or expedited vendor response
- Duplicate licensing or unused software subscriptions
- Time spent manually reconciling data across disconnected systems
- Delayed shipments or invoicing due to unplanned downtime
One Ohio-based manufacturing plant
calculated that its internal ticket response delays were costing it nearly
$7,200 per month in lost productivity. After switching to a managed services
model with proactive monitoring, they reduced their costs by more than half—and
got better sleep.
"If
you don't measure the hidden costs, you can't manage the real budget." — Ram Charan, business
advisor and author
Another manufacturer held onto their
aging in-house system too long. When the system failed during a CMMC audit
cycle, the $18K emergency fix paled in comparison to the $250K in delayed
contract revenue.
"Technology
should reduce stress, not redistribute it." — Ann Dunkin, CIO, U.S. Department of
Energy
Questions to bring to your next budget
planning meeting:
- What's our average internal ticket resolution time—and how has it changed?
- Are we paying for overlapping services or licenses?
- Are we paying for stuff we don't even use?
- How often do outages impact core business functions?
- What do we spend reacting to IT issues instead of preventing them?
Understanding the full picture doesn't
just help the budget—it helps you lead from a place of calm, not crisis.
