The Top 5 IT Challenges Manufacturers Face With Their IT Providers
Part 1: Why “Slow and Unresponsive” Is Still the #1 Complaint
After interviewing more than 40 manufacturing clients this year, we set out to answer a simple question: where are manufacturers most often let down by their IT providers? The five challenges we heard most frequently were:
This is Part 1 of a five-part series in which we examine the deeper reasons these basic “blocking and tackling” issues remain the top IT challenges manufacturers face.
What surprised us most is that every item except #5 is a core service-delivery function — something every business needs, not something unique to manufacturing. The concerning inference is this: if manufacturers are still struggling with the basics, they are probably not addressing the deeper challenges that truly hold them back from being as profitable and competitive as possible.
Challenge #1: Slow and Unresponsive Support
Slow, unresponsive support was the number one challenge we heard this year — cited in nearly 30% of our interviews. What surprised us most is how basic the underlying problem is. Responsiveness, time to close tickets, and ticket follow-up are, at their core, IT 101. Yet they remain the most common pain points manufacturers report.
This is inexcusable — but it is not random. It reflects several macro-trends reshaping the managed-services industry. Here are our assertions about why such a basic feature of a service business goes missing so often.
Most MSPs Are Generalists
The majority of MSPs support many industries at once, and their service metrics are calibrated to balance customers with very different needs. One minute a service-desk engineer is helping a marketing agency with an Adobe InDesign issue; the next, they’re triaging a critical network outage at a plant. For a manufacturer, that trade-off is costly. IT downtime is production downtime, and production downtime causes chaos. Industry research pegs the average cost of unplanned manufacturing downtime at roughly $260,000 per hour, with smaller manufacturers still losing around $125,000 per hour and unplanned downtime costing U.S. manufacturers an estimated $50 billion a year. Your needs are not “one size fits all,” and a support model built to be “balanced” across industries rarely treats a line-down event with the urgency it deserves.
The Private-Equity Factor
Over the past five years, managed IT services has become one of the most heavily targeted segments in private equity. Dozens of funds and smaller private groups are buying and consolidating MSPs across the country. Drake Star reported 111 MSP M&A transactions in Q2 2026 alone — up 9% quarter over quarter (Drake Star Q2 2026 MSP Market Update). Across all of 2025, deal volume surged roughly 20% to 466 deals worth $4.3 billion.
Post-acquisition, the deal is almost always pitched to clients as a benefit — expanded capabilities, broader scope, greater operational maturity. We’ve watched dozens of these situations unfold, and service levels almost always decline as the new owner squeezes for profit. Turnover picks up, the solution stack changes, and the operational approach becomes more institutional and less personal. Analysts note the same pattern: PE buyers frequently prioritize scale, recurring revenue, and rapid expansion over service quality and customer satisfaction.
We’ve spoken with seven clients whose providers have already sold in 2026. Each acquisition lowers service quality across the market: a relatively strong, responsive local player is removed and replaced by a larger, slower rollup.
Victims of Their Own Success
The managed-services industry has been growing fast — the global MSP market is projected to climb from about $350 billion in 2025 to $850 billion by 2034, a 10.4% CAGR (Drake Star). With an estimated 40,000-plus MSPs in the United States — most generating under $10 million in revenue — this is a highly fragmented industry that has favored career IT people looking to expand a business over seasoned operators looking to run a company. And despite a wealth of tools that make managing an MSP easier than ever, running one well remains genuinely complex.
What This Means for You
If you’re a customer, it is critical to be able to ask your provider a simple question: “What are the core metrics that run your business and keep everyone happy?” A strong provider will have dashboards and reports at their fingertips that clearly connect the dots between their performance and your satisfaction.
This should resonate with any manufacturer. You work hard to maintain the right inventory levels, lead-time promises, work routing, shifts, and staffing to meet your commitments. Yet ask many small and midsize MSPs what ratios they hold on their service-desk team, how much ticket backlog they tolerate, their project-throughput speed, or their cybersecurity metrics — and too often you’ll get a blank stare or a wave of the hand.
Just like a manufacturer, your IT provider should be able to give you hard numbers and firm commitments. If they can’t, that tells you everything you need to know about why the basics keep slipping.
Next in the series: Challenge #2 — the reactive, break-fix trap, and why “we’ll fix it when it breaks” quietly costs manufacturers far more than they realize.
Upward Technology is a manufacturing-focused Managed IT Services firm with clients nationwide. Our combination of best-in-class service, unique manufacturing technology capabilities and ERP experience make us unusual in the IT market. Bottom line- we help turn manufacturing IT into a competitive advantage.
Sources
Drake Star, MSP Market Update Q2 2026
Drake Star, 2025 MSP M&A Report (466 deals, $4.3B)
Info2Soft, Unplanned Downtime Cost (2026 Updated)
Supply & Demand Chain Executive / Fluke, Unplanned Downtime Costs U.S. Manufacturers
Netwolf Cyber, The Risks of Private Equity-Owned MSPs
Managed IT Services, How Many MSPs Are There in the US?