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Manufacturing · Third-Party Maintenance

How a multi-site UK manufacturer cut £190K from its Cisco support bill — without losing 24/7 production SLA

Customer: Discrete manufacturing — automotive Tier 1 supplier
Sector: Manufacturing
Size: 1,200 staff · 4 UK production sites + Slovakia subsidiary
Region: Midlands + South-East UK
Headline Outcomes
£190K
Annual support cost reduction (45% of total)
4hr
P1 SLA maintained for production-line kit
0
P1 incidents during cutover
99.97%
Production-line availability — exceeded SLA
NIS2
Compliance posture achieved on schedule
£14K/h
Cost of a production stoppage — none triggered
Act 1 — The Challenge

£420K annual Cisco SNTC renewal across 4 sites. Half the kit was past Cisco TAC engineering depth.

  • ⚠£420K annual Cisco SNTC across Catalyst access switches, Nexus core, Catalyst SD-WAN edge, and UCS hyperflex blade chassis
  • ⚠Catalyst 3850 access switches — Cisco engineering depth thinning rapidly post 2024 EOSL
  • ⚠Plant-floor uptime SLA: 99.9% production-line availability — a P1 switch failure stops the line and bills £14K/hour in lost production
  • ⚠OT/IT segmentation, IEC 62443 compliance, and NIS2 incoming — couldn't risk uncovered hardware
  • ⚠Procurement under cost pressure — Cisco renewal was the largest single line in the IT opex budget
Act 2 — What Servnet Did

Servnet ran a hardware audit of all 4 UK sites in 2 weeks. Identified what to move to TPM, what to keep on OEM, and what to refresh.

01

Asset register + age/EOSL audit

Walked every comms cabinet across 4 UK sites. Built a complete asset register with serial number, model, hardware revision, current OEM coverage date and Cisco EOL milestone for every device.

Cisco DNA CenterServnet asset discovery
02

TPM/OEM split decision

60% of estate moved to Servnet TPM with 4-hour SLA + UK parts stock (Catalyst 3850, Nexus 5K, older Catalyst 9300 stock). 25% kept on Cisco SNTC (new Catalyst 9500 core, new Nexus 9K spine). 15% refreshed to current generation.

Servnet TPMCisco SNTC
03

OT/IT segmentation

During the refresh window, IT/OT VLAN segmentation strengthened — production-line PLCs and HMIs isolated from corporate IT, with monitored unidirectional connections only.

FortinetClaroty
04

Site-by-site SLA cutover

TPM cutover phased site-by-site over 8 weeks. Cisco SNTC contracts let lapse on completion of each site. Zero P1 incidents during transition.

Servnet TPM
“
We were nervous about leaving Cisco SNTC on production kit. Servnet were straight with us about what to leave on OEM, what to move to TPM, and what to just bin. The numbers spoke for themselves — and the SLA performance has been better than what Cisco was delivering, frankly.
Head of Group IT · Automotive Tier 1 supplier · Midlands
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