Home / Case studies / Critical uptime
Keeping the line running: cutting downtime cost for a manufacturer.
For a Surrey manufacturer, the server that ran scheduling and inventory was a single point of failure with no tested backup. Every outage stopped production. We turned those multi-hour stoppages into non-events.
On a production floor, IT downtime isn't an inconvenience — it's idle staff, stalled orders, and missed shipments. The maths is brutal and simple: when the system stops, the whole floor stops with it.
The challenge
The manufacturer ran scheduling, inventory, and shipping off one aging server. It had no redundancy, and its backups were copying to a drive in the same room — useless against a fire, a flood, or ransomware. Twice in the prior year the server had gone down mid-shift, each time taking three to four hours to limp back. With the floor idle, a single afternoon outage cost roughly $8,000 in lost production — before counting the late shipments and the scramble.
What we did
- Removed the single point of failure. We moved the critical workloads onto resilient, monitored infrastructure with redundancy built in, so one failed component no longer means a stopped floor.
- Rebuilt backup & recovery. Automated, encrypted backups with off-site copies kept in Canada, plus a documented recovery plan we test on a schedule — turning a four-hour scramble into a minutes-long, rehearsed restore.
- Added 24/7 monitoring. Disk health, capacity, and service alerts now reach us before they reach the floor. Several would-be outages were caught and fixed after hours, before anyone noticed.
- Put it on a predictable plan. All of it under one flat per-device monthly rate — no surprise project bills the next time something needs attention.
The results
Since cutover there have been zero unplanned outages that stopped production. The critical system can now be recovered in minutes instead of an afternoon, and the roughly-$8,000 cost of a single stoppage simply hasn't recurred. The owner stopped budgeting for "the next server emergency," because there hasn't been one.
"The server used to be the thing I worried about on weekends. Now I don't think about it at all — which is exactly what I'm paying for."
The pattern: for any business with a critical system, the question isn't if hardware fails — it's how long you're down and what it costs when it does. Redundancy plus tested recovery turns that from a crisis into a footnote.
What would an hour of downtime cost you?
If a critical system runs your business, let's make sure it can't take the business down with it. A free assessment covers your single points of failure, backups, and recovery time.
Book a free IT assessment