Traverse City Products: Managed IT for a 50-person Northern Michigan manufacturer
Industry
Metal manufacturing, roll forming and stamping, Traverse City, MI
Size
50+ team members, one facility, about 40 managed devices and 3 servers
With ACS
More than a decade
Plan
ACS Managed IT Basic with user security services
Who Traverse City Products are
Traverse City Products has made custom roll-formed and stamped metal parts in Traverse City since 1982. Fourteen roll mill lines, six stamping presses up to 800 tons, a welding cell, and in-house engineering and tooling make them a one-stop manufacturing partner for automotive, office furniture, glass, flooring and conveyor customers. They are a tier-2 supplier to some of the largest auto manufacturers in the world, ISO 9001 and IATF 16949 certified, with 50-plus team members at one plant on Hughes Drive.
That kind of shop runs on IT whether anyone notices or not: shop-floor computers, shipping and label systems, an ERP, CAD, a quality system, and the SharePoint libraries that hold the procedures an IATF auditor asks for.
Where they started
When ACS took over, support was slow, there was no documentation to speak of, and there were security issues nobody was on top of. Their previous IT company had left the basics undone. There was no single breaking point. It was the everyday cost of waiting for help and not knowing what was on the network.
What we did first
We started where the risk was: remote monitoring and management on every machine, patch management, managed antivirus, and a help desk the team could actually reach. The goal was simple, stop the security bleeding and get people quick help. Documentation followed, because you cannot secure or support what you have not written down.
What it looks like today
Traverse City Products is on the ACS Managed IT Basic plan with user security services. One flat-rate agreement covers:
- Monitoring, patching and maintenance on about 40 devices and three servers, patched overnight so the plant never waits on a reboot
- Endpoint detection and response, email protection, dark web monitoring and Microsoft 365 backup for every user
- Server backup, a managed FortiGate firewall and a UniFi network with ten access points and nine switches across the office and plant
- Help desk for the team, with a 15-minute response target on anything critical
- Shop-floor and shipping computers treated as what they are, production equipment, with shared plant accounts set up so the floor keeps moving without leaving someone’s personal login open
- Their camera system and phone system, which we support alongside the rest
- A SharePoint environment with real structure behind it, which we support and keep untangled, and ongoing work with leadership on where AI fits in the business
The results
Measured from our ticketing system, April through October 2026:
- 99 percent of tickets resolved inside the agreed response and resolution targets
- Median first response on a user-reported issue of about 11 minutes, with three out of four answered inside an hour
- Zero ransomware incidents and zero confirmed malicious detections across the plant’s Windows fleet in the last Datto EDR quarterly review, with endpoint detection quietly screening thousands of process events every day
- A documented environment in IT Glue, so any ACS engineer who picks up a Traverse City Products ticket already knows the network
The number that matters most to a manufacturer is the one that does not show up: shipping did not stop because a label PC died with nobody watching it.
Why it has lasted more than a decade
Consistent, reliably fast service. Traverse City Products calls, someone who knows their plant answers, and the problem gets fixed. We are two miles away on Union Street when it needs hands on hardware.
A note from Albert
Working with an IT company that knows manufacturing means you have a partner who shares your priorities: fast response, secure networks, and no downtime. That is what we have built with Traverse City Products, and it is what we build for every manufacturer we work with in Northern Michigan.