For many manufacturing companies with around 25–50 employees, the best IT model is often neither fully outsourced nor fully in-house.
In a lot of cases, a hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds.
You keep the business knowledge of an internal IT manager, but you add the wider expertise, resilience, and capacity of an external IT provider.
It can also help avoid the £40,000–£60,000+ annual cost of hiring an additional IT team member while reducing key-person risk and improving support for production-critical systems.
Challenge the Assumption
One of the biggest mistakes manufacturers make is assuming they have to choose between an IT manager and an IT provider.
Either everything is outsourced.
Or everything stays in-house.
In reality, that usually isn’t true.
And some of the strongest manufacturing environments we see are built around a hybrid approach.
The 3 IT Support Models for Manufacturers
| Model | Best For | Main Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Fully Outsourced IT | Manufacturers without a dedicated IT employee | Less day-to-day internal ownership |
| Internal IT Manager | Businesses with complex internal systems and strong in-house knowledge | Key-person dependency |
| Hybrid IT | Growing manufacturers with production-critical systems | Needs clear responsibilities between internal and external teams |
Model 1: Fully Outsourced IT Support
For many manufacturing businesses, a fully outsourced model works well.
Everything comes through your IT provider:
But the key point is this:
Done properly, it shouldn’t feel busy. It should feel quiet.
Behind the scenes, systems are standardised, monitored, maintained and improved constantly. Problems are often identified and resolved before users even know they were there.
Model 2: Internal IT Manager
Some businesses have an internal IT manager who has done an excellent job for years.
They understand the business.
They know the systems.
They’ve helped the company grow.
That kind of person is hugely valuable.
But there’s a challenge.
If they’re doing everything, they’re probably doing too much.
Because when one person is responsible for:
…they don’t get much time to focus on the bigger questions:
And those are the questions that actually move the business forward.
Model 3: The Hybrid Approach
This is where we see some of the best results.
You keep your internal IT manager.
But instead of leaving them to shoulder everything alone, you give them the backing of an external IT provider.
This gives you:
It also gives the business flexibility.
Hiring another IT team member can easily cost £40,000–£60,000+ per year.
In many cases, businesses can achieve the same outcome by giving their existing IT manager the right external support.
Think of It Like a Factory Maintenance Engineer
You wouldn’t want only one person who understands every machine on the production floor.
That person would be incredibly valuable.
But if that person is unavailable, the business becomes vulnerable.
IT is no different.
The more critical your systems become, the more important it is to build resilience around key people.
The Key-Person Risk Nobody Likes to Talk About
The biggest risk with a single internal IT manager isn’t usually technical capability.
It’s dependency.
If that person leaves…
If they’re unavailable…
If they move on unexpectedly…
You lose a huge amount of knowledge overnight.
We’ve seen businesses where:
That only becomes clear after the IT manager has left.
And at that point, you’re recovering under pressure.
Why One Person Can’t Know Everything
Even a brilliant internal IT manager has one built-in limitation:
They only see one business.
They know your environment well, but they may not have seen:
For example:
We regularly see internal IT managers who know their factory systems inside out, but haven’t had to roll out Microsoft 365 across hundreds of users, implement advanced monitoring, or manage recovery from a ransomware incident.
That’s where external experience becomes valuable.
You’re not replacing internal knowledge.
You’re adding to it.
A Real Manufacturing Example
We supported a manufacturer with a single factory that brought in an internal IT manager, and we worked alongside that person for around three years.
At the start, that IT manager was being dragged under by support tickets that needed immediate attention but weren’t actually important.
By taking first-line and second-line issues off their desk, we gave them space to focus on higher-value work.
That allowed them to move from reactive support into more strategic work such as:
Together, we helped the business:
At one point, their internet line went down—but production continued, because the business had chosen to keep the manufacturing systems in-house and properly backed up.
Over time, the company grew from one site to multiple factories across Britain and Europe.
Its internal IT team grew too, but the external support stayed in place as a constant layer of resilience, project support, and fallback expertise.
What This Means in Practice
The strongest setups usually include:
This gives the business room to grow without overloading one person.
Final Thoughts
The question isn’t whether IT should be internal or outsourced.
The question is whether your current model gives the business:
Because if it doesn’t—
that’s where the real risk sits.
At Affirm IT, we work with both fully outsourced and hybrid models.
We help manufacturing businesses build practical IT structures that support growth without overloading one person or leaving key risks hidden in the background.
If you’re not sure whether your current setup gives you enough coverage, don’t hesitate to
get in touch with us.
