In manufacturing, ITSM is part of the supply chain

Key takeaways

• In manufacturing, IT downtime doesn't stay inside the building—when the line stops, the whole supply chain feels it

• Growth and acquisition can lead to silos and slow down systems; in manufacturing, this threatens production

• Modernizing IT is essential in manufacturing—Seagate overhauled a system for 30,000 employees in three months

A retailer whose systems go down has a bad day. A manufacturer whose systems go down stops making things and somewhere downstream, a shipment doesn't arrive or a job site stalls. The stakes of IT failure in manufacturing have always been higher than in most industries because the consequences don't stay local.

Some manufacturers have figured this out. They've modernized under pressure with no room to fail. They've rebuilt infrastructure rather than patching what was broken. They've absorbed acquisitions without letting the complexity harden. 

Modernizing in record time at Seagate

Outdated, slow-moving legacy systems can be a major hindrance for a company that helps power the cloud. And yet, Seagate Technology’s IT team had been running on the same platform for 14 years. Seeing the old system as too rigid to modernize and too costly to justify trying, IT leaders opted for a full rip-and-replace, with a tight deadline of just three months to migrate the entire 30,000-person global organization. 

Rather than carry old workflows into the new environment, the team rebuilt from scratch: new service catalog, globally consistent SLAs, automated ticket routing. "We intentionally did not want to bring forward our legacy processes," says Jody Wetterlind, senior director of IT. Device42 replaced manual asset tracking with automated discovery across Seagate's hybrid infrastructure, surfacing more than 10,000 assets. Freddy AI Agent went live in MS Teams on deadline.

The deflection rate hit 32%. A year later, says Vinod Pasi, VP and global head of IT infrastructure, "nobody remembers what our previous platform was." For a company whose product is the infrastructure the world runs on, that's the standard.

Read more: Seagate's 3-month, 30,000-person IT overhaul

Vermeer automates so customers stay online 

The machines Vermeer builds handle heavy-duty work like boring tunnels, laying pipelines, clearing land on job sites worldwide, equipment that  runs on schedules with little tolerance for delay. The same is true for Vermeer's production floors. "If an outage shuts down a line in manufacturing, we're losing money every minute," says Mike Jansen, senior IT business services manager. "Change management in Freshservice is critical to prevent that."

Before modernizing, Vermeer's IT environment ran almost entirely on manual processes, with tickets dispatched by hand, asset data in spreadsheets, and incidents sorted by people rather than systems. For a company scaling globally with production facilities on multiple continents, it was a fragile foundation. After implementing Freshservice, structured change management replaced the ad hoc approach, automated routing replaced manual triage, and Freddy Copilot put AI assistance in agents' hands. Resolution time dropped nearly 50%. Customer satisfaction reached 95%.

“Our customers are using our equipment to make money,” he says. “If our equipment breaks down, or if they can't get parts and service, they can't make money.”

Read more: How Vermeer transformed ITSM and doubled efficiency

Coherent makes its operations more cohesive

When a laser manufacturer operates across 20 countries and four newly merged companies, IT must keep up. At Coherent, that meant the team inherited four separate ITSM platforms, siloed teams, and workflows that didn't talk to each other. On production floors where workers from different companies were now supposed to operate as one, that fragmentation had consequences that showed up in the work.

"With so many post-merger technologies, our teams struggled to communicate and collaborate," says CIO Anantha Ganga. "Without a cohesive IT service management platform, catering to teams and employees was an uphill battle." Within four months of consolidating onto a single platform, more than 500 agents were working from the same system. The team resolved more than 65,000 tickets in the first six months. A custom Okta integration now ensures new employees have access before their first day.

Read more: Unified ITSM improves productivity for Coherent

Expanding ticket capacity at HOLT CAT

Across Texas, construction sites break ground, oil fields run equipment, and farms turn over harvests, much of it powered by Caterpillar machinery that HOLT CAT sells, services, and supports. Now one of the largest Cat dealers in the world covering 118 counties, HOLT CAT grew through acquisition and organic expansion, and its IT infrastructure accumulated the same way, layering on new IT workflows in cumbersome ways.

"Everything was manual," recalls Katherine Villarreal, former ITSM administrator and asset manager—dispatching tickets, maintaining asset data, differentiating incidents from service requests.

Ticket volume was outpacing what the legacy system could handle—a problem that doesn't stay in IT when the people waiting on answers are keeping job sites running. Within six months of implementing Freshservice, 142 agents were collectively handling nearly 10,000 tickets, average resolution time was under five hours, and analytics were surfacing SLA trends the old system had never made visible.

"Our employees love the tool and its ease of use," says Katherine Villarreal, former ITSM administrator and asset manager. "Engagement with our old system's user portal was very low, but since implementing Freshservice, portal usage has increased significantly." The equipment HOLT CAT services is what keeps Texas industries moving. It turns out the expectation for IT is exactly the same.

Read more: HOLT CAT expands ticket capacity with better ITSM

Manufacturing has always had to perform under pressure. Now, AI and automation help IT ensure uptime at all times.