IT support for manufacturers
Manufacturing IT is different. Downtime costs money you can measure. OT/IT segmentation matters. ERP integrations break in inventive ways. We bring office IT discipline and we know not to push patches at 2pm on a production day.
Built for the realities of the work.
The things you actually care about, baked into how we run your IT.
OT/IT Segmentation.
Production network protected from office network. Updates only happen in maintenance windows.
ERP & MES.
Integrations with Epicor, Genius, Microsoft Business Central, and bespoke ERPs. Without breaking them.
Uptime.
Redundant network, UPS-backed core, and 24/7 escalation that knows your production calendar.
Industrial Devices.
Barcode scanners, ruggedized tablets, label printers. Procured, imaged, and supported.
The stack we deploy in this sector.
Most sites end up with a similar mix. Yours might differ. We tune it.
Managed IT.
Flat-rate, per-user, per-month. Helpdesk, patching, security, and reporting under one invoice.
Managed IT →Cybersecurity.
EDR, MFA, phishing training, dark web monitoring, and managed detection and response.
Cybersecurity →Cloud & Microsoft 365.
Tenant security baselines, mailbox migration, SharePoint hygiene, and Teams that actually works.
Cloud & Infra →Compliance support.
PIPEDA, CASL, and sector-specific privacy alignment. Cyber insurance questionnaires done right.
Compliance →What an hour of downtime actually costs a plant
The IT conversation in manufacturing is not about laptops. It is about the fact that a stopped line burns labour, misses a shipment window and sometimes scraps material in progress, and that number is almost always larger per hour than the entire monthly IT spend. Everything below follows from that asymmetry.
The network on the floor, not the office.
Plant-floor switching, wireless coverage that survives metal and moving equipment, and cabling that was not run by whoever was free that week. Office IT failing is an inconvenience; floor networking failing stops production.
ERP and MES uptime, including the database nobody documented.
The scheduling and inventory system is the plant's nervous system, and in most SMB manufacturers it runs on a server whose configuration lives in one person's memory. Documenting and monitoring that is unglamorous and it is the highest-value thing on the list.
Keeping OT and IT apart.
PLCs, HMIs and machine controllers frequently run operating systems that cannot be patched because the vendor certified them that way. The answer is segmentation, so an office ransomware event cannot reach the machines. See network segmentation.
The uncomfortable version: a lot of plant equipment is running software that is a decade past support and cannot be updated without invalidating a vendor warranty or a safety certification. Nobody is going to replace a working press because its controller is old. The realistic plan is to isolate it, monitor what talks to it, and make sure it is not reachable from an office laptop.
Working around a production schedule
Every maintenance window on a plant is a negotiation with production. That shapes how the work gets planned.
Changes happen on your shutdown, not ours.
Patching, migrations and hardware swaps get scheduled into planned downtime or a shift change. Where that is genuinely impossible, we build the rollback first and agree the go or no-go point in advance.
A failed switch should not stop a shift.
For anything whose failure halts production, the plan is a configured spare on a shelf near the machine rather than a next-day courier. It is cheap insurance measured against an hour of stopped line.
You own the drawings.
Network diagrams, VLAN maps, ERP server configuration and vendor contacts, written down and handed to you. If your IT provider changes, the plant keeps running.
More industries we serve
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Get a Free Assessment Back to industriesFrequently asked questions
How does manufacturing compliance software in Canada improve efficiency?
By automating data collection and reporting, these systems reduce manual errors and save significant time. North Star ensures your software is hosted on a secure, high-performance network that prevents downtime. This allows your team to focus on production while our systems track regulatory requirements in real-time, ensuring you remain audit-ready at all times across your Canadian facilities.
What cybersecurity measures are essential for Canadian manufacturers?
Manufacturers are frequent targets for ransomware. We implement a multi-layered defence strategy including EDR, multi-factor authentication, and security awareness training. Protecting your intellectual property and manufacturing compliance software in Canada is our priority. By securing your industrial control systems and office networks, we prevent breaches that could lead to costly production halts or regulatory penalties.
Can you support legacy manufacturing equipment with modern IT?
Yes, many Canadian plants rely on older machinery. North Star specialises in bridging the gap between legacy hardware and modern manufacturing compliance software. We use secure networking and cloud gateways to pull data from your existing equipment, providing you with modern insights without requiring an immediate, expensive overhaul of your entire shop floor infrastructure.
Questions we get asked in this sector
Can you support machine controllers running Windows XP or Windows 7?
We can protect them; we cannot patch them. Machine controllers, HMIs and PLC front ends are often certified against a specific operating system version, and updating them can invalidate a vendor warranty or a safety certification. The realistic approach is network segmentation so the office network cannot reach them, monitoring of what does talk to them, and removing them from any path to the internet. Anyone promising to bring that equipment fully up to date has not asked your machine vendor.
Do you work around production schedules?
Yes, and it is the main planning constraint rather than an accommodation. Patching, migrations and hardware replacement get scheduled into planned shutdowns or shift changes. Where a change genuinely cannot wait for a window, we build and test the rollback first and agree the go or no-go point before starting, rather than discovering mid-change that reverting is not possible.
Our ERP is old and only one person understands it. Is that a problem?
It is the most common risk we find in SMB manufacturing and it is fixable without replacing the system. The work is documenting the configuration, backing it up in a way that has actually been restore-tested, and monitoring the server so a failing disk is noticed before it stops the plant. That is considerably cheaper than an ERP migration and it removes the single point of failure that matters most.