Downtime is one of those words that every business owner and manager just dreads to hear. Systems, servers, data, and a plethora of machines not working correlates directly to loss of income and some perpetual headaches. When some or all of your people cannot access core IT systems and data, it’s always bad news – for relationships with customers, for productivity, for morale and, ultimately, for the bottom line. Here at MLK Computing we have over 14 years of experience in ensuring your systems are always online and our team of wizards have achieved an uptime to 99.7% throughout this decade alone.
However, in the manufacturing and engineering (M&E) world, the downtime discomfort is doubled and the numbers that result can be, well, eye wateringly large.
Are you sitting down?
A wide range of studies indicate that the average manufacturer experiences 800 hours of downtime per year – or more than 15 hours per week. For the average automotive manufacturer, one MINUTE of downtime costs almost $32,000.
Even though the precise damage and cost of unplanned downtime depends on a plethora of factors and varies from one business to the next. Hopefully, your downtime costs do not reach those of our automotive friends. But even losing a few hundred pounds per hour could make the difference between profit and loss on a job. MLK Computing’s onsite IT support and offsite IT assistance teams are working 24/7 to assist all our clients with their IT demands.
MLK Computing, brings the best of IT technology at your fingertips. At MLK Computing, our focus is to utilise our superior technical skills to provide reliable IT support for your business. Through all our years of service, we have moved ahead with commitment to quality, trust, and impeccable customer service. We keep up with the developments in technology to bring you the best solutions at all times. You can trust us for reliable, affordable, and efficient offsite and onsite IT services to meet every requirement of your business.
Additionally, downtime can administer horrible knock-on impacts, with expensive machinery lying idle, inventories becoming depleted, staff abandoning other critical tasks to comprehend the implications of the downtime and then advise customers of delivery delays and not to mention supply chain management. Your reputation for reliability and great service, hard-earned over many years, is suddenly under immediate threat. 100% uptime is the goal and here at MLK Computing we have achieved just that, we liaise with all types of business sizes from all around the world and we ensure that you will be functioning at maximum capacity all year round.
Coming face to face with a challenge like this, you have to get practical – very quickly! What do we do about this then? Well, here are some key things that manufacturing and engineering businesses can do to minimise unplanned downtime – and even planned downtime too:
- Understand the risks and potential costs to your business of downtime
- Implement a strategy and action plan to proactively manage all aspects of your IT
- Put a disaster recovery plan in place
- Organise regular automated backups
- Regularly check your backups
- Monitor and update all your devices and systems.
The thing is, for most businesses with limited IT resources and expertise, the most efficient and cost-effective way of ensuring that these tasks are completed and checked is to work with a trusted IT service partner with specific technical expertise and management skills. One that understands your business essentials, such as speed of response, proactive support and the importance of security, and is familiar with the M&E sector too, in particular the vital role of reliable IT, in your ERP and MES environments for example – and where your vulnerabilities may lie. Although there are costs involved, as there are engaging with any supplier, these are usually very reasonable, while the impact of not making this investment can be huge. MLK Computing offers cost efficient IT support both onsite and offsite around the clock all around Australia. We are the pioneering team of IT and have built on our reputation and established our presence as the finest IT support team.
If you are concerned about the impact that downtime could have on your business and what you can do to prevent it, email us on info@mlkcomputing.com.au or call us on 03 9470 6723 for a confidential chat about how we can help.