Critical IT and OT assets are at the heart of every manufacturing operation. In the IT space, servers are responsible for hosting every system and application required to remain operational. ERP systems, MES, databases, CRM, scheduling and warehouse management are all mission critical systems found in almost every manufacturing facility across the land.
Add to this the plethora of OT equipment and before you know it you have a fairly large list of critical assets, any one of which could fail and disrupt operations. OT equipment by its nature and heritage is not as open as modern IT systems and is generally not monitored as readily as the more open and ubiquitous IT equipment.
Some of the equipment can be over 20 years old and locked away in control cabinets in areas of a facility that may be hazardous, inaccessible or dirty. Performing routine walk around checks may require a technician to put on PPE and open panels which have exposed electrical components. And in the majority of cases, a visual inspection of a PLC for example may not provide much evidence of an issue.
It’s easy to understand why it’s essential these assets, systems and applications are able to perform continuously and why any degradation in performance or downtime of any one can have such a detrimental effect on business performance.
Having access to the right resources when things go wrong can mean the difference between a rapid response with insight to overcome the issue with no significant downtime, or a delayed response with lengthy investigation and troubleshooting while your production lines and team that run them wait for a resolution.
Prior warning of an issue before it escalates is even better, and imagine how good it would be if the first you knew of a problem was when you were informed a problem had been discovered and corrective action taken to avoid any business interruption.
That’s exactly what Astec’s Service Operations Centre offers. Continuous monitoring and proactive health checks for all your critical IT and OT assets. Our system works like a 24 hour guardian, constantly looking for warning signs that something isn’t quite right and alerting our engineers to an issue or potential issue.
Service Operations Centre is different to any other remote monitoring tool available because it monitors your critical OT assets as well as your IT assets. Often overlooked by standard IT monitoring tools, OT equipment failures can be difficult to isolate down to the correct component and diagnosing the problem can be time consuming and labour intensive.
Talk to Astec today about how our solutions, including Service Operations Centre, can help reduce unplanned downtime, increase productivity and boost profitability for your manufacturing business. Call us on +44 1543 888134 or email enquiries@astecsolutions.com.
Infinitely scalable, Service Operations Centre has tiered pricing to fit any budget and because it’s a fully managed service you can be certain someone is continually monitoring your systems, ready to respond when necessary.