Manufacturing IT support comes with many challenges. From shop floor machines to safety and cybersecurity, IT leaders deal with unique issues that aren’t found in other industries.
How does a seasoned professional solve these problems?
I recently sat down with Nick Holliday, IT Divisions Manager at Nucor Corporation, to discuss his experience in depth. Nucor is a leading manufacturer of steel, and Nick manages a diverse IT practice across 22 manufacturing locations. His answers to my questions offer deep insight into best practices for IT leaders in manufacturing.
Key takeaways:
- Manufacturing IT teams must triage incoming support requests carefully, not allowing low-priority requests to sit and get worse.
- Forward-thinking IT teams are enabling worker safety through sophisticated technology solutions.
- It’s critical for IT to coordinate planned downtime with physical maintenance teams.
- Proactive communication and empathic leadership are crucial for maintaining strong, positive relationships between IT and other teams in manufacturing.
Note: The written interview has been edited for style and clarity.
What does it take to run a modern IT environment in manufacturing?
We don’t have the luxury of acceptable downtime. We have to make sure mission-critical systems don’t go down.
I also have to lead with empathy. My team and I have to care about the people we’re serving, not just treat it as technical work.
It’s also important to own your mistakes and keep learning. You don’t have to have all the answers, but you have to educate yourself and seek solutions.
What does a typical day look like in manufacturing IT?
Each of our team members has a core set of hours they work. We have mills and plants that run 24/7. When we get to work in the morning, we check for fires before anything else. My team’s responsibility is tier 1 and tier 2 support, from helpdesk issues to major network problems happening onsite. Their first task is to check the ticket queue, making sure everything is going well.
We also have a daily standup. We report on the daily progress of ongoing projects. We have over 100 projects in action right now, and that’s outside the ticket queue. That’s across all 22 sites that I help support. These situations change daily, so I check in every day to see where we need to adjust.
It’s a lot of triage work. I’m in a lot of meetings, interfacing with controllers and GMs at the facilities. Hearing from them, communicating a lot of project work, giving status updates, and seeing where we’re at.
I also deal with a lot of funding questions. Leaders want to know, why am I paying for this? Ultimately, they want to make money and move steel out the door. They lean on me for the IT opinion on what they should do to manufacture steel more efficiently.
We also spend time talking through personnel things. The team sees each other every day. We ask, “How’s this person doing?” It’s cliché to say, but this is a high-stress environment. It’s really important to me and our other leaders to make sure our people are doing well mentally.
I work pretty normal hours considering the workload we have. The day ends around 5 or 6 for me, and I go home. But we do have second and third shifts that run the entire night. We keep our phones on “loud,” and those calls do come through sometimes. Whether we can help remotely, or we have to drive in, we’re there.
What is the primary focus of IT operations in manufacturing?
Our primary focus is to help them “kick tons out the door,” as we say—which means moving tons of steel product out the door. In IT, we want to make sure they’re doing that as efficiently as possible.
IT isn’t making the company any money. We’re a cost center. We’re looking for ways to save money and make the process more efficient. Sometimes, that means standing over the shoulder of an operator on the line, watching them work, and saying, “I think I can automate what you’re doing there.” Or, “I can save you some time here so you can work on more important initiatives.”
Does IT help with safety in manufacturing in addition to cybersecurity?
Absolutely. Our IT team covers physical security as well as cybersecurity. We want to give plant floor managers the tools to keep their team as safe as possible.
We work in a dangerous business, and we want people to go home healthy and whole. IT is a crucial piece of that puzzle in manufacturing. As technologies evolve, we’re having a bigger voice in the safety conversation. For example, if someone crosses a line into a dangerous area, we can have a camera and an automated alert that goes off and says, “Whoa, you can’t be there”—or even something that will shut a machine down if you cross that red line.
We’re even looking at technology that will show people if they’re not wearing the proper protective equipment. For example, if they’re missing a helmet, an alarm will go off to let them know.
How much of the IT team’s bandwidth is dedicated to break/fix support for shop floor machines?
That’s a challenging question. It varies by site. Typically, my teams are responsible for ensuring that those PLCs (programmable logic controllers) or HMI (human-machine interface) computers have the network connections they need. Those connections might go back to the vendor, which may be in another country. Or they might go to a local resource such as a file server or database, so the machine can pull up part information and populate it appropriately. That’s my team’s responsibility to make sure they always have that connectivity.
Now, in some sites, we have entire automation teams whose responsibility is to get into the nuts and bolts of that. Some of those teams are actually responsible for the programming of the PLC machines, which is more technical.
How do IT teams maintain stable environments in manufacturing, when downtime isn’t an option?
We maintain system stability through notifications to the shop floor leadership, letting them know when we need to do maintenance or patch systems.
It’s challenging to get buy-in for planned downtime, but we always talk about it in terms of cost. No one wants to go down, but the reality is that you’ll either go down soft, or you’ll go down hard. Talking to leadership about that, we highlight the fact that unplanned downtime costs more than planned downtime. We need to spend a little money and accept a little downtime to avoid significant cost and significant downtime. No one wants to send an entire shift home in the middle of the night.
Staying proactive is a high priority for our IT team. Leadership will be more open to our plans when we communicate them ahead of time. We expect ourselves and our teams to be so good at their jobs that we can forecast and say, “On this date, we’re going to need to shut things down for two hours.”
How can IT leaders in manufacturing communicate effectively with other stakeholders?
Proactive communication is key. For example, outside of the shop, on the business side, we work with our finance teams to say, “When are you doing your month-end reports? We’ll try to avoid doing maintenance then.” They appreciate that.
I’ve even asked production managers for shift schedules so we can plan downtime. If the maintenance team is going to take an entire machine offline, can the maintenance wait till this window? If so, I need to know so we can coordinate. Those are good moments for us to jump in and do IT maintenance.
How do IT leaders in manufacturing deal with older and newer equipment operating in the same environment?
That’s a hard one. A lot of those shop machines are meant to last for decades. It’s not like buying a new washer and dryer and knowing you’ll have to replace it in a few years.
For example, we had a plasma cutter at a particular site. We’d had it for decades, and it had a really state-of-the-art Windows XP operating system. But it was older, and the parts were challenging to work with. My team really had to think on their toes when that machine went down.
We also lean into vendor support. We ask questions like, “What kind of support are you going to give us for this machine?” My team can’t be experts at everything. If you’re going to sell us a sophisticated machine, we need some specialized support to go with it.
What’s the key to prioritization when everything feels urgent in manufacturing IT?
We liken it to a triage scenario or an emergency room. We might have a guy who walks in with a splinter—and another guy who walks in with a gunshot wound. Obviously, we’re going to treat the guy with the worst problem first.
The challenge with this approach is that additional severe problems can come in, and the low-priority items can sit for a while. If you let the guy with the splinter just sit there, that minor issue will get infected. You’ll have people who say, “It’s been weeks. Now this IT issue is really affecting my work.” And it was a minor issue at first.
So there’s a delicate balance. We have to help with those minor splinters, but if something is down, that’s critical. It’s getting top priority.
I always tell my teams, “I’m your best friend and your worst enemy when it comes to prioritization.” I’ll be the first one to say, “Hey, that’s not a priority.” Then I’ll also be the guy to say, “Don’t forget about this. You have to push this forward.”
We still have projects going on, and we have the day-to-day as well. It’s a difficult balance.
I always talk to my techs and admins about this. It’s easy to look at ticket stats and say, “What you’re working on is not a priority.” But I may not know the backstory. When I hear the backstory from them, that helps me make a better decision.
I can also help prioritize an initiative if a controller or GM is saying, “This is a big priority.” The decision is easy in that case.
How do you combat the paradoxical notion that if you don’t hear from IT, you’re paying them for nothing… and if you do hear from IT, things are broken, and you’re paying them for nothing?
We challenge our teams to do what we call “mill rounds.” We want them to be physically visible at the plants and mills—even just to get up, walk around, and talk to the team on the floor. If someone submitted a ticket, and it’s been closed, we want them to follow up in person, even if the technician knows how the resolution went. That’s huge.
A lot of people who aren’t in IT get frustrated with IT. They feel like when they submit a ticket, it goes out into the ether, and there’s this magical wizard behind the screen fixing this. I want you to know that the people on my team are actual people. They’ll get a drink with you after work. They’ll be at your kid’s baseball game because their kid is on the same team. Building that relationship is essential.
We’re not tucked away in cubicles all the time. Yes, we do work in cubicles, but we also get out onto the floor and talk to people.
How do you lead in manufacturing IT when you don’t control the budget or make those decisions?
In these situations, I try to be really empathetic with my team. It’s easy to say, “This is what’s happening, so deal with it,” but that’s not going to help our personal relationship.
It’s another thing to say, “This is what’s being asked of us, and honestly, I don’t know why this decision was made, but I trust this person to make this decision. So this is how we’re going to do it.”
Here at Nucor, we’ve been blessed to have solid leadership across the board. At multiple divisions that I work with, the leaders are making good decisions. Now sometimes, decisions are made that onsite IT personnel may not fully understand. They may say, “That’s more expensive than what I would’ve chosen.”
We have to help them say, “Maybe that’s not the decision I would’ve made, but this is a good person. We can follow their lead and trust that there’s a reason behind the decision.”
Honestly, leadership at a division isn’t saying, “Do this and don’t question us on it.” They’re very open with me on those decisions, which makes my job easier. From the top down, we’re told the “Why” all the time. We can’t just roll in and start kicking down the doors. Even if it’s something really important like cybersecurity, it’s crucial that everyone, including corporate IT, should understand the “Why.”
What soft skills have helped you as an IT leader to build trust across manufacturing departments?
Caring about people. That’s it.
When you care about your people, that drives you to get better at your job. I want to solve this for someone I care about, not just a faceless customer. That’s the core of success in manufacturing IT support.
We also work with local department leads who are working with these systems on the ground. We get feedback from them and follow up on projects. A lot of my job is checking in with group leaders and other supervisors. I ask questions like, “Hey, how is this going for you? What do you need from me? Is your CAD software working for you?”
When you make a habit of this, you find that people actually have change in their pocket for you. That’s crucial, because we all have to work together to get those steel tons out the door.
What advice do you have for someone who wants to get into manufacturing IT?
My advice is, don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
There’s a perception that to get into leadership in IT, you have to have all the right degrees and certifications—that you should walk in and just know stuff.
It would shock everyone to realize how little I know in some situations. But that ability to walk into a situation and figure it out quickly, understanding a system, while connecting with that person on a relational level—that’s huge, especially in the manufacturing sphere.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes if you’re looking to step into an IT leadership role. Own those mistakes, learn from them, and do better next time. Stay humble in those moments and be teachable. These principles have served me well and driven my entire career.
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