In past blogs we’ve talked about the need to scrutinize (and cut) IT spend within Enterprise IT and a few office functions (e.g. Sales and marketing). This next series will focus on understanding Plant and Engineer IT and what needs to be understood before any actions are taken to reorganize or reduce staff.
Plant and engineering systems generally don’t follow the mold of standard enterprise IT and associated office functions. Technical staff outside of IT spend a lot of money and have few of the intricate process steps that protect Enterprise IT.
Caution to Enterprise IT – the software and requirements for engineering and plant applications are often VERY different than ‘standards’. For example, old robots and plant equipment may still run Windows 7 (or even Windows NT and Windows XP).
If a box is ‘updated’ by Enterprise IT and a key machine stops in production the consequences are expensive. It may not be practical to upgrade those applications. Similarly, systems requirements for engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE – Solidworks, Pro/E, AutoCad, etc.) are very different from ‘office standard’.
Those differences include intricate license management, multiple displays, and very large CPUs, RAM, and fast-storage. Frequently in use are multiple high-security networks, specific Linux or Windows configurations, and interfaces to customers.
The people that tend these boxes and applications often have specialized knowledge of what ‘got it to work’ (and then no documentation). Other frequent problems are a lack of configuration control management, missing, or incomplete backups, and totally missing security and other keys/passwords.
If care isn’t taken to understand these environments, wrongly directed reduction actions can cause dire consequences.
Up next – 7 things to document today in Plant & Engineering IT
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