On a plant floor, the network is production. When a line stops because a switch failed or a segment went down, the cost is measured in stopped output, and for this manufacturer a single hour of downtime ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The company, a Fortune 500 supplier of automotive components, was running an aging network across 12 facilities. The design had grown plant by plant over the years, with little segmentation between systems and few redundant paths. A fault in one place could ripple into others, and uptime sat at 97.2 percent. For an operation where the line cannot stop, that gap was expensive every time it showed.
Over 18 months, LightChange redesigned the network across all 12 plants. The work added redundant pathways with automatic failover so a single failure no longer takes a line down, segmented the network with a zero trust model so a problem in one area stays contained, upgraded the wireless with heat mapping at each site, and put continuous monitoring in place to flag anomalies as they appear. CertHunter handles certificate lifecycle, IP Fortress anchors the network security layer, and Overwatch carries the monitoring and response.
The results held across the floor:
- Uptime rose from 97.2% to 99.9%
- $3.2 million in annual savings from reduced downtime and tighter operations
- 75% fewer security incidents
- 60% faster recovery when a production line does go down
- 45% better wireless performance across all facilities
"When an hour of downtime costs six figures, reliability is the whole job," said Michael O'Coners, CEO of LightChange. "We rebuilt the network so a single fault can't take a line with it, and we documented the whole thing so their team can run it without us in the room."
That documentation was part of the deliverable from the start. The client's internal team came out of the project able to maintain the network themselves, which is how we'd want it.
If your plant network has grown faster than it was designed for, that's a gap we can close. Reach us at hello@lightchange.com.