Incident management isn't just for tech companies
If you work in software, you probably think of incident management as an established practice. If you work in manufacturing, you might not think of it at all — even though you deal with incidents every day.
In software, when a service goes down, there's typically a well-defined process. Someone declares an incident. A severity level is assigned. The right people are paged. Communication happens in a dedicated channel. Actions are tracked. Afterward, there's a review of what happened and what can be improved.
This didn't happen by accident. It evolved over a decade of tooling — PagerDuty for alerting, Slack channels for coordination, incident.io and Rootly for structure. The result is that software teams have gotten measurably better at handling incidents. Mean time to resolution has dropped. Repeat incidents have decreased. Knowledge is retained.
Manufacturing handles harder incidents with worse tools
Consider what happens when a production line goes down in a factory. The problem is physical — a valve failure, a conveyor jam, a temperature excursion. The people who need to respond might be on a factory floor, not at a desk. The shift that discovers the problem might not be the shift that can fix it. Safety implications can be immediate and serious.
And yet, the coordination tools are typically: a group chat (WhatsApp or Teams), a phone call, and someone's memory. There's rarely a structured severity system. There's no automatic escalation. The incident timeline — what happened, when, who did what — is scattered across chat messages that nobody will search through later.
This isn't because manufacturing teams don't care about incident management. It's because the tools weren't built for them. Enterprise platforms like SAP PM or Maximo offer incident tracking, but they're expensive, complex, and designed for a different workflow. They're not where the team communicates during an active incident.
The building blocks exist now
Two things have changed that make structured incident management accessible for manufacturing teams:
First, chat platforms like Microsoft Teams are now standard in most manufacturing organizations. The communication layer already exists — it just needs structure.
Second, language models can now extract structured data from natural conversation. A team discussing an incident in chat is already creating a timeline — they just need a tool that captures and organizes it automatically.
What changes when incidents get structure
The shift isn't just about faster resolution — though that happens too. The real change is organizational:
- Knowledge stays with the team. When an experienced operator retires, their incident knowledge doesn't leave with them.
- Patterns become visible. You can't spot a recurring equipment issue if incidents aren't recorded consistently.
- Escalation becomes policy, not panic. The right person gets involved at the right time, based on rules — not based on who the shift supervisor happens to have in their contacts.
- Follow-ups get done. When action items are tracked to completion, the root cause actually gets addressed.
Software teams learned this over the past decade. Manufacturing teams can learn it faster — they just need tools that respect how they work.
That's what we're building with Haveri. If you're interested in bringing structured incident management to your manufacturing operation, let's talk.