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Manufacturing

Rebuilding a plant network without stopping the line

Segmenting plant and office traffic, fixing warehouse Wi-Fi that failed once the racking was loaded, and documenting an estate nobody had a diagram for.

Client
FMCG manufacturerNamed once permission is confirmed
Year
2025
Duration
7 weeks
Stack
MikroTikCiscoUbiquitiAPC

  • 0

    Minutes of unplanned production downtime

  • 4 segments

    Production, office, surveillance and guest, previously one

  • 100%

    Aisle coverage verified with racking loaded

  • Documented

    Diagrams, IP plan and asset register handed over

The situation

A flat network carried office email, production controllers, cameras and warehouse scanners on the same broadcast domain. Warehouse Wi-Fi had been signed off against an empty floor plan and stopped working once the racking was stocked. There was no current network diagram, and the switch stack had grown by daisy-chaining unmanaged switches into whichever port was free.

What we did

  1. 1Audited every switch port, captured traffic for a week, and produced the first accurate diagram the site had ever had
  2. 2Designed a segmented topology separating production, office, surveillance and guest traffic, with explicit routes between them
  3. 3Re-surveyed warehouse wireless with the racking loaded, which moved six of nine planned access point positions
  4. 4Executed the rebuild in four weekend windows, each with a tested rollback prepared in advance
  5. 5Certified and labelled every installed run, and handed over configuration backups plus an asset register

The dead spots in the warehouse are gone, and for the first time somebody can tell me what is plugged into what.

— Plant IT Lead (attribution pending approval)

The survey that saved the project

The wireless design had been done properly. Against an empty warehouse.

Loaded racking absorbs and reflects 5GHz signal in ways that a floor plan cannot predict. Our re-survey, done with the warehouse in its normal stocked state, moved six of the nine planned access point positions and changed two of the antenna choices.

Had we installed to the original plan, the result would have looked like the system it replaced, and the customer would reasonably have concluded that Wi-Fi does not work in warehouses.

Segmentation was the cheap win

The highest-value change on this site cost configuration time and almost no hardware: putting production controllers, office machines, cameras and guests on separate segments with written policy between them.

Before, a compromised office laptop had a clear path to a PLC. That is not a theoretical risk in a plant, and it was removed in the first weekend window.

Four weekends, four rollbacks

Nothing was cut over without a tested way back. Each window had a defined scope, a success check, and a rollback that had been rehearsed on the bench.

Three windows went to plan. The fourth hit an uplink that had been mislabelled years earlier; we rolled back at 02:00, corrected the documentation, and completed it the following weekend. No production time was lost, which is the only measure that mattered.

What the handover included

Logical and physical diagrams, an IP address plan, VLAN and firewall documentation, configuration backups for every device, cable test certificates, the labelling schedule, and an asset register with serials and warranty dates.

The site can now be worked on by someone who has never visited it. That was explicitly part of the brief.

Services involved

More work

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