The Hidden Costs of Manual Application Support: Why Automation is Inevitable

I was sitting across from the CIO of a mid-sized pharmaceutical company in Pune last month when he sighed and said, “Look, we know our application support is outdated, but we’re just trying to keep the lights on. We’ll modernize when things slow down.”

I’ve heard this same story countless times across factory floors in Gujarat, boardrooms in Mumbai, and production facilities in Hyderabad. The truth? That “perfect time” never arrives – instead, what I’ve seen is companies drowning in technical debt that eventually demands payment… with hefty interest.

Last summer, I witnessed the aftermath of an ERP outage at a chemical processing plant outside Vadodara. Their system went down for just 6 hours during peak production. Six hours! While their IT team frantically worked phones and terminals trying to restore database connections, three production lines sat dormant.

When I caught up with Rajesh, the plant manager, weeks later, he looked exhausted. “38 lakhs,” he told me, shaking his head. “That’s what those 6 hours cost us between lost production, expedited shipping to meet commitments, and the overtime we’re still paying to catch up.”

The costs of sticking with manual support aren’t always this obvious, but they’re just as real:

Your best IT minds? They’re spending 60-70% of their time handling repetitive support tickets instead of driving innovation. I’ve seen brilliant engineers reduced to human restart buttons.

Response times tell another story. When I benchmark Indian manufacturing companies against global leaders, I see a troubling gap – 47 minutes average response time versus under 5 minutes with automated systems.

For my pharmaceutical clients, compliance issues keep them up at night. During a facility tour in Hyderabad last year, a validation system crashed right as FDA inspectors were onsite. Without automated documentation of system changes, they couldn’t prove consistent record-keeping. The remediation costs? Over 2.5 crore, not counting the reputational damage.

And don’t get me started on knowledge silos! A specialty chemicals client in Maharashtra lost their senior systems administrator last quarter – he’d been there 14 years. Three weeks later, their inventory system developed issues that nobody else understood. Two days of production delays later, they finally reached him on his vacation to talk them through it.

Things don’t have to be this way. The technology landscape has evolved dramatically, yet I’m still walking into factories with support models that haven’t changed since 2010. Three approaches are changing this:

RPA: The First Step For many of my chemical manufacturing clients, simple RPA tools have been game-changers. One factory in Gujarat implemented bots to handle basic system monitoring and first-level support. The same tasks that used to consume 3-4 support staff are now handled automatically, with humans only stepping in for complex issues.

Their production head told me, “It’s like having a tireless support team that never takes breaks or gets distracted.”

Generative AI: Beyond the Basics I’m particularly excited about what Gen AI is doing for my pharmaceutical clients. Last quarter, I helped implement a system that analyzes past incidents to predict potential failures. During our first month, it flagged an impending storage issue that would have disrupted batch processing during a critical production run.

“The system spotted patterns none of us had noticed,” their IT lead admitted. “And then generated documentation that satisfied our compliance requirements in minutes instead of hours.”

Agentic AI: The Complete Picture The most advanced operations I work with are using agentic systems that handle monitoring, analysis, and remediation together. One of my chemical sector clients in Navi Mumbai implemented this approach last year. Their system not only identifies issues but resolves them autonomously while learning from each incident.

Their CTO joked with me recently: “Some mornings I check the logs and find out the system resolved issues overnight that would have had us scrambling a year ago. I’m not sure whether to be impressed or worried about my job security!”

Let me tell you about Sunita, the operations director at a vaccine manufacturer with facilities spread across three states. When I first met her in 2022, she was burning through IT budgets on firefighting rather than innovation.

Her support process was painfully familiar:

• Critical database issues typically took 3-4 hours to resolve
• Each incident pulled 6+ people from strategic projects
• Documentation for compliance was a nightmare of manual steps
• During batch processing, her team practically lived in the office

After implementing an integrated automation approach, the transformation was remarkable. Average resolution time dropped by 87%. Documentation effort fell by 65%. They’ve gone 14 months without critical downtime, and her IT staff has finally been able to focus on modernization projects.

“What shocked me,” Sunita told me over coffee last month, “wasn’t just the efficiency gains. It was how our last regulatory inspection went. The inspector commented on how thorough and consistent our system documentation was. We used to dread those visits!”

Safety improvements have been equally impressive. A specialty chemicals producer I work with in Maharashtra automated monitoring for their hazardous materials tracking. Before, manual checks sometimes missed integration failures between systems. Now, those gaps have been eliminated, preventing potential incidents while maintaining operational visibility.

The most successful transitions I’ve seen follow a natural progression:

First comes basic automation – scripts and monitoring tools that handle the obvious repetitive tasks. Then intelligent support systems that analyze patterns and suggest fixes. Finally, fully integrated ecosystems where applications can self-heal and adapt.

As my client in Gujarat’s chemical sector put it during our last quarterly review: “We were investing crores in production technology while our IT support was stuck in the past. We finally realized automation wasn’t just an option—it was inevitable.”

Here’s the simple truth I’ve learned from walking factory floors and IT departments across India’s industrial landscape: application support automation isn’t just about IT efficiency. It’s about production reliability, regulatory compliance, and staying competitive in increasingly demanding markets.

Every week you delay is another week your competitors might be pulling ahead. In industries where downtime costs lakhs per hour and compliance failures risk market access, clinging to manual support processes isn’t just inefficient—it’s increasingly risky.

The manufacturing leaders I see thriving are treating application support with the same innovation focus they apply to their core production systems. They recognize that in today’s connected operations, the line between IT and production has essentially disappeared.

So I’ll leave you with the question I asked that CIO in Pune: Is your support model ready for tomorrow’s challenges, or are you still using yesterday’s approach to solve today’s problems?