Manufacturing / Vendor Consolidation
3 vendors into 1. Mean time to resolution down 60%.
A mid-market manufacturer with around 2,500 employees across five plants was running three separate providers. An MSP for infrastructure, an MSSP for SOC, and a cloud integrator. The finger-pointing between them made every incident slower than the incident itself.
The problem
The CTO inherited this three-vendor setup when he joined. Every critical incident spawned a war-room call where each vendor explained in turn why the problem wasn't theirs. Mean time to resolution was creeping toward 4 hours for production-impacting events, which in a manufacturing environment is the kind of number that gets noticed by the board. Our approach aligned the response model to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework so that detection, response, and recovery phases had single accountability across the stack.
The engagement
- Week 1-2: EFROS ran a free infrastructure assessment across all three stacks. Mapped overlaps, gaps, and handoff failures.
- Week 3-6: Phased takeover. MSP operations migrated first, then SOC monitoring, then cloud operations. Each transition had a documented runbook, and no tickets were lost in any handoff.
- Week 7-12: Unified alerting, single SLA, single escalation tree. Custom detection content tuned to the OT/IT environment. Microsoft Sentinel deployed with tuned rules for manufacturing-specific TTPs mapped against MITRE ATT&CK for ICS.
- Ongoing: 24/7 SOC, monthly executive review, quarterly architecture review, annual DR test.
The outcome
“We replaced three vendors with EFROS. Infrastructure, security, and cloud all run under one SLA now. Our mean time to resolution dropped 60%.”
— CTO, mid-market manufacturer
- Mean time to resolution: from ~4 hrs to under 90 min for production-impacting events
- Ticket ping-pong between vendors eliminated. One RACI, one owner per incident.
- SOC detection coverage increased 3x via cross-stack correlation
- Total IT + security spend down 12% vs. the three-vendor status quo
Voices from the engagement
Additional perspectives from the same engagement across different roles.
“Total IT and security spend is down 12% versus the three-vendor setup. One contract replaced three. My finance team stopped reconciling overlapping SOWs at every quarter close.”
— CFO, mid-market manufacturer
“A packaging-line PLC went dark at 11 PM. Their on-call had the plant superintendent on the phone inside 7 minutes and the line was back before second shift ended. No vendor finger-pointing, just someone fixing it.”
— Director of Plant Operations, mid-market manufacturer