Modern manufacturing operations rely on 100% uptime, as production halts or supply chain disconnects cause downtime costs to compound by the minute. For IT directors and heads of resilience, optimizing the major incident management (MIM) process is now a strategic necessity to protect revenue and reduce engineer burnout.
Why is incident risk rising for manufacturers?
Cutover’s Major Incident Management Report, surveying 300 IT and operations leaders, shows a staggering 80% of manufacturing organizations believe they are at a greater risk of major incidents today than they were a year ago - the highest risk perception of any industry surveyed.
Key factors driving incident risk
When asked which factors were driving this increase in risk, most respondents said they were dealing with multiple issues:
- IT skills shortages: 53% cite a lack of in-house expertise.
- Cybersecurity threats: 52% are pressured by rising digital threats.
- Environment complexity: 52% struggle with multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructures.
Most concerning incident types for manufacturers
We also asked which types of incidents most concerned them:
Manufacturing incident resolution benchmarks
Not only are incidents becoming more frequent, manufacturers are also struggling to resolve them in a timely manner. While speed and context are vital for a 3:00 AM response, many manufacturers are currently losing time to manual "toil" - such as hunting for runbooks or manually paging responders. 61% agree that legacy procedures pose significant risks to their business, leading to:
- Increasing MTTR: It takes an average of 3.71 hours to resolve incidents affecting mission-critical apps.
- Resolution lag: 39% of manufacturers take more than 4 hours to reach resolution- the highest of any industry surveyed.
- Worsening trends: 50% of respondents agree that incidents are taking longer to resolve now than 12 months ago.
Orchestration over chaos: The automation ROI
To achieve zero-touch operations, manufacturers are shifting toward structured orchestration. Currently, 33% take a fully integrated approach to major incident management with automation and real-time visibility - the most of any industry surveyed.
Current incident management automation priorities
Here’s where manufacturers have focused their efforts so far when implementing automation in their MIM processes:
- Incident visibility: 54% automate communication and status updates.
- Rapid mobilization: 50% automate getting the right people on a call immediately.
- Task reduction: 48% automate repetitive manual tasks.
The Result: 83% of manufacturers agree that automation investments have tangibly improved their MIM process.
The AI advantage and the future of resilience
The sector is rapidly moving from basic automation to intelligent, agentic workflows. In fact, 85% of manufacturing leaders are optimistic about AI’s potential to improve incident response.
What manufacturers want in a best-in-class MIM platform
When prioritizing what would be most useful in a MIM platform, agentic AI capabilities were one of the most popular, along with improving visibility and automating tasks:
- Stakeholder self-service: Real-time status updates (50%)
- Repetitive task automation: Reducing manual overhead (43%)
- Agentic AI: AI capable of acting autonomously during a crisis (41%)
AI implementation hurdles to overcome
Despite the optimism, manufacturing IT teams remain cautious regarding:
- Data privacy: Security risks associated with AI models.
- Human oversight: The strict need to override AI when necessary.
- Explainability: Understanding the "why" behind AI-driven decisions.
These concerns will need to be taken into account as manufacturers seek to use AI more for major incident management. There is a need to balance speed and efficiency with safety and control.
Eliminate the 3:00 AM incident management chaos
If a tool doesn't help a responder resolve an issue faster, it’s adding to the noise. By engineering a smarter MIM process with automated runbooks and AIOps, manufacturers can empower SRE and DevOps teams to focus on building rather than firefighting.
Learn more about Cutover’s incident management solution for manufacturing.