Industries
IT for manufacturing
Plant floor and back office, one plan.
happier IT supports manufacturers across Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario. Manufacturing IT is two jobs joined at a seam: an ordinary office network, and a plant floor full of equipment never designed to be networked at all. Most of the value is in how those two are kept apart.
Who it's for
Two environments, one building.
Office and plant systems have different rules and lifespans. Treating them as one network is what we are most often called in to unpick.
SYSPRO, Epicor and Sage X3
ERP: enterprise resource planning, the system holding orders, inventory, purchasing, scheduling and costing in one place. When it slows at month end, working out whether the cause is the database, the report or the network is measurement rather than guesswork.
Machine controllers and the systems around them
PLCs, programmable logic controllers, the small computers that run machinery, plus operator panels and monitoring software. Collectively this is OT, operational technology, judged on uptime and safety rather than on being current.
CAD, CAM and nesting software
Design and toolpath files are large, reference each other, and behave badly over a slow link, which makes where they live a real decision.
Scanners, label printers and shipping stations
Barcode terminals look like minor peripherals until one stops and shipping stops with it. They get treated as production equipment, with spares.
What's included
What actually goes wrong in a plant.
Ordinary events, not disaster scenarios. Most are avoidable with design rather than spend.
-
One flat network from the front office to the far bay
Everything can reach everything, which is convenient until an office laptop can talk straight to a machine controller. Separating the two is the highest-value work in most plants, and it can be staged around production.
-
A machine that cannot be patched
Good equipment often runs an operating system its vendor stopped updating years ago, and it will outlive several more. You fix that by giving it its own segment and limiting what may talk to it.
-
Standing remote access for machine vendors
A permanent tunnel gets installed at commissioning and never reviewed. Better: access that is requested, time-limited, logged and switched off afterwards.
-
The ERP slows at exactly the wrong time
Month end, a large order, a shipping cutoff. Performance that is tolerable in a quiet week gets expensive in a busy one, and it is measurable in advance.
-
Payment details changed by email
Manufacturing runs on emailed purchase orders and invoices with large sums attached. Email authentication plus a verification step for any banking change removes most of that exposure.
-
Shift work and shared logins on the floor
Three shifts on one terminal account is understandable and makes traceability impossible. Badge or PIN switching gives individual identity without a password prompt for someone wearing gloves.
How it works
How we start in a plant.
Nothing that risks production. The first phase is entirely observation.
-
We draw the two networks as they really are
Every device, every link between office and floor, every vendor connection, every machine and what it runs. Done by looking, because the diagram on the wall is rarely current.
-
We separate, in stages, around the schedule
Segments go in during planned downtime, one area at a time, each with a written back-out. Office and floor stop reaching each other by accident.
-
We plan around the machines you keep
For each unpatchable system: what it is, why it stays, what protects it now, and what happens when it finally goes.
What it costs
For manufacturers, the requirement usually arrives from a customer.
There is no manufacturing-specific privacy statute in Canada. There is, increasingly, a supply chain that asks questions.
Statutory obligations for a private manufacturer are mostly about people: PIPEDA, the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, covers employee and contact data, with the provincial equivalent, PIPA, the Personal Information Protection Act, in Alberta and British Columbia.
The pressure that actually arrives comes through contracts. Large customers, primes and public buyers attach security schedules and send annual questionnaires. Firms handling controlled goods work under Canada’s Controlled Goods Program, and suppliers into the United States defence chain get asked about American requirements flowing down from their customer. Some buyers ask for ISO 27001, the international standard for managing information security.
We help you answer those truthfully. Where the honest answer is “not yet”, we give the customer a date.
Downtime is the number that matters
Most manufacturers already know their cost per hour of stopped line. That figure is the right way to size a second internet path, a spare switch or a tested restore.
We ask for it early, and use your number.
Why us for this
What we can evidence, and what we will not claim.
We work with manufacturers and industrial businesses in Western Canada.
Verifiable today: certifications across Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, HP/HPE, VMware, CompTIA and Red Hat, and a security operations centre in Canada staffed by happier IT employees rather than a bought-in monitoring service.
Questions
What people ask before they sign anything.
Do you work on the plant floor as well as the office?
Yes, and for most manufacturing clients the floor is the more interesting half. That means network design separating production equipment from office computers, vendor access that is controlled rather than permanent, and monitoring that tells you a line-side switch has failed before an operator does.
We have machines running an operating system nobody supports. What do we do?
Keep the machine, and change what can reach it. An unsupported controller cannot be patched, so the answer is segmentation, its own part of the network, only the systems that need it allowed to talk, and logging on what does.
Can you support our ERP?
We support the environment an ERP, enterprise resource planning system, depends on: servers, database performance, network paths, printing, integrations, backups and accounts. We are not the vendor’s implementation consultants, and we say so before you sign.
A customer sent us a cybersecurity questionnaire. What are they asking for?
Almost always the same list: multi-factor authentication, a second check, usually on a phone, before a login is accepted, on email and remote access, endpoint protection, patching, tested backups, a documented offboarding process and an incident contact. Most of it is ordinary hygiene.
Should we add automation and sensors to our line?
Often yes, with the network question settled first. New sensors want a connection, and the easy path is to plug them into whatever is closest, which is how a plant floor becomes reachable from an internet nobody meant to expose. Our guide to safe automation for Alberta manufacturers works through it.
Related
Where to go next.
Want to know what this would look like for you?
A 30-minute call. No slides, no audit fee, no obligation. We ask what is breaking and tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.