Hertfordshire Engineering IT Support Contract

A precision engineering company based near Watford contacted IT Support Watford after their previous IT arrangement, a part-time IT contractor who visited monthly, had become inadequate for their growing operational needs. The business had 28 staff across a manufacturing floor and a connected office environment, and IT issues were beginning to affect production schedules.

The Challenge

The engineering company was running a hybrid IT environment: Windows workstations in the office, a mix of older Windows and industrial control systems on the factory floor, and a cloud-based ERP system accessed by both teams. Their monthly IT contractor handled reactive work competently but had no visibility between visits. Issues would fester for weeks before being addressed.

The production manager had tracked IT-related production delays informally over six months: 14 incidents totalling approximately 28 hours of lost manufacturing time. At the company's margin rates, that represented a direct cost of over £35,000 in lost output. The managing director was clear that this level of disruption was unsustainable.

A further concern was cybersecurity. The company held commercially sensitive client drawings and specifications. They had recently been through a supply chain audit by a major automotive client that had highlighted several security gaps and given them 90 days to address them.

The Solution

IT Support Watford took over the IT contract with an initial two-week documentation and assessment phase. We mapped every device and network connection, identified the five most common causes of the production incidents, and produced a prioritised remediation plan with costings.

The most pressing issues were addressed immediately: outdated firmware on the network switches causing intermittent connectivity drops, an unmanaged VLAN that was allowing office and factory floor traffic to interfere with each other, and backup failures on the ERP server that had gone unnoticed for four months.

Over the following six weeks, we deployed our full managed support infrastructure: centralised monitoring agents on all Windows devices, patch management for office systems (factory floor systems required coordination with the machine vendor), and endpoint protection appropriately configured to avoid interfering with industrial control software.

For the automotive client audit, we completed the Cyber Essentials Plus certification within the 90-day window, implemented network segmentation between office and factory floor environments, and produced the required IT security documentation for the client's supply chain portal.

The Results

In the six months following our managed IT contract taking effect, production delays attributable to IT dropped from 28 hours to fewer than four hours, a reduction of over 85 percent. The managing director calculated that this translated to retained output worth approximately £30,000.

The automotive client supply chain audit was passed without conditions within the 90-day window. The production manager noted that the team now raised fewer IT-related complaints at weekly operations meetings.

• IT-related production downtime reduced by over 85 percent in the first six months
• Cyber Essentials Plus achieved within 90-day supply chain requirement
• ERP backup integrity restored and verified within the first week on contract

What the Client Said

"The difference between having someone who is in the systems every day versus someone who comes in once a month and reacts to whatever they find is substantial. IT Support Watford found problems we did not know we had, and fixed them before they caused more downtime."

Want Similar Results?

If IT is affecting your manufacturing or operations environment, we can carry out an assessment and give you a clear view of what is causing downtime and what it would take to fix it. Contact IT Support Watford to get started.