Leicester has long been recognised as one of the UK’s manufacturing centres, with businesses across Leicester and Leicestershire producing everything from food and drink, textiles and packaging to plastics, pharmaceuticals and precision components.
For manufacturers, technology is at the heart of daily operations. It keeps production lines moving, manages stock, supports customer orders and enables teams to work efficiently across the business.
Over the past six months, your business has probably changed. You may have taken on new customers, recruited additional staff, introduced new production equipment or invested in new business software to improve efficiency.
Every one of those changes has an impact on your IT environment.
Perhaps you’ve upgraded your ERP system, introduced warehouse management software, expanded your Microsoft 365 environment or connected new machinery to your network. While these changes support growth, they can also introduce new risks if they aren’t reviewed regularly.
The challenge isn’t the change itself—it’s ensuring your systems, security and processes have kept pace.
Who still has access to critical business systems?
Are your production and office networks properly protected?
If a server failed tomorrow, would everyone know what happens next?
By the middle of the year, many manufacturing businesses are operating on assumptions rather than certainty.
Here are four areas worth reviewing before those assumptions become costly problems.
1, Access Permissions Have Expanded – Have They Been Reviewed?
Manufacturing businesses regularly welcome new employees, temporary workers and contractors. Existing staff take on additional responsibilities, while temporary access is often granted to support production, maintenance or customer projects.
What doesn’t always happen is reviewing those permissions once they’re no longer required.
As a result:
Employees may have access to systems or business data they no longer need.
Former employees or contractors may still have active accounts.
It may be unclear who can access your ERP system, production schedules, customer information or financial data.
A simple question to ask is:
Do the right people have the right level of access today?
If identifying who has access to your critical systems would take time or guesswork, it’s worth carrying out an access review.
2, New Systems Have Been Added – But Are They Working Together?
As manufacturing businesses grow, new technology is introduced to improve efficiency and meet customer demand. You may have implemented a new ERP system, introduced warehouse management software, adopted production monitoring tools or expanded your cloud services.
Each investment makes sense on its own. Collectively, however, they can create unnecessary complexity. Business data becomes spread across multiple systems. Integrations aren’t always maintained. Different departments begin working with different versions of the same information.
The result is duplicated work, inconsistent reporting and uncertainty over where critical business information is stored.
Ask yourself:
Are your systems working together efficiently, or have your teams simply adapted to working around them?
3, Are You Confident You Could Recover After an IT Incident?
Most manufacturing businesses have backups. Far fewer regularly test whether those backups would restore operations after a ransomware attack, hardware failure or accidental deletion.
Recovery procedures are often undocumented. Restoration times are unclear, and responsibility for managing an incident isn’t always well defined. When your business depends on production schedules, customer orders, inventory systems and financial data, uncertainty can quickly become expensive.
Consider asking:
Having backups is important. Knowing they’ll work when you need them is essential.
4, Has Responsibility Become Less Clear?
As manufacturing businesses evolve, accountability can become blurred. New suppliers are introduced. Internal roles change. Additional software is implemented. Processes develop over time.
Eventually, ownership becomes unclear. When an issue affects production systems, cloud services and third-party providers, valuable time can be lost deciding who’s responsible for resolving it.
Ask yourself:
If a significant IT issue disrupted production today, would everyone know who was responsible for managing it?
Clear ownership leads to faster decisions, reduced downtime and greater confidence during an incident.
The Biggest IT Risks Often Come From Everyday Change
Many technology risks don’t come from systems failing. They come from changes that were made, accepted and then never reviewed.
The most resilient manufacturing businesses aren’t necessarily those with the most sophisticated IT—they’re the ones that review it regularly. They check who has access to critical systems, test their backups, understand how their technology works together and ensure responsibilities remain clear.
That visibility helps reduce operational risk, improve resilience and keep production moving.
Is It Time for Your Mid-Year IT Review?
At IT2, we work with manufacturing businesses across Leicester and Leicestershire, helping them keep their IT secure, reliable and aligned with the needs of modern manufacturing. We understand the challenges local manufacturers face—from reducing downtime and protecting business-critical systems to meeting the growing cybersecurity expectations of customers and supply chain partners.
If you’d like an independent review of your current IT environment, we’d be happy to arrange a no-obligation discovery call. Together, we’ll review what’s changed since January, identify any areas of concern and help ensure your technology continues to support your business throughout the rest of the year.
Contact us Today to Schedule Your Initial Consultation
