Operational technology is the heartbeat of modern manufacturing. It controls production lines, robotics, safety systems, and the processes that keep products moving out the door.
Yet for many large manufacturers, OT data still lives across a patchwork of disconnected tools, spreadsheets, and network silos. Visibility is partial. Governance is inconsistent. When security issues emerge, response efforts often lack the business context needed for smart prioritization.
That was the reality for a global automotive manufacturer that recently launched an enterprise initiative to bring OT visibility, governance, and vulnerability management onto a single, trusted platform. The goal was not simply to connect tools, but to fundamentally change how OT assets were understood, governed, and protected across the organization.
Challenge
The manufacturer operated a sophisticated production environment supported by industrial controls, robotics, and multiple cybersecurity platforms. While each system performed well independently, the organization lacked a unified way to answer basic but critical questions:
- What OT assets do we actually have?
- Where are they located?
- Which production lines do they support?
- Which vulnerabilities truly pose the greatest business risk?
OT asset data existed across several platforms, each with its own naming conventions, identifiers, and data quality gaps. Duplicate records, overlapping IP ranges, and incomplete attributes made it difficult to trust any single source. Vulnerability data was available, but without production context, it was nearly impossible to determine which issues were merely technical and which posed an immediate threat to manufacturing operations.
- Security teams struggled to prioritize remediation.
- OT engineers lacked a governed asset inventory they could rely on.
- IT teams had limited insight into operational environments.
- Leadership faced growing concern over operational resilience, regulatory exposure, and the true security posture of their manufacturing footprint.
The organization needed a governed, contextualized OT system of record that could bridge OT, IT, and cybersecurity into a single operational view.
Solution
The company chose to anchor its transformation on ServiceNow Operational Technology Management, treating OT assets with the same rigor traditionally applied to IT services. The program was structured deliberately, beginning with governance, modeling, and data strategy before any large-scale automation was introduced.
The first step was establishing a formal OT data governance and reconciliation framework. Multi-source asset data was analyzed across existing security and network platforms, and a clear data-precedence strategy was defined to determine which systems would act as the authoritative source for specific asset attributes. This ensured that as data flowed into the CMDB, it would be normalized, deduplicated, and made trustworthy.
At the same time, the organization worked with plant leadership and OT engineers to define an ISA-95 and Purdue Model hierarchy that accurately reflected real-world production structures. This enabled every OT asset to be placed into a business context, mapped not just to a network, but to a specific site, production line, and operational function.
With governance and modeling in place, automated adoption of OT asset data was implemented using industrial security tooling as the primary discovery source. OT-specific configuration item classes were built inside the ServiceNow CMDB, and reconciliation rules were deployed to prevent duplicate identities as additional data sources are added over time.
Once visibility was established, OT Vulnerability Response was introduced to ingest and manage OT-specific security findings. For the first time, vulnerabilities could be analyzed based not only on technical severity but also on their potential operational impact.
Equally important, the solution was supported by a structured enablement program across four core groups: platform engineering, cybersecurity, service desk, and managed services. Each team received role-specific training tied directly to how they would operate the new OT capabilities day to day.
Results
By the end of the initial deployment, the manufacturer had transformed its OT visibility and security posture from fragmented to enterprise-ready.
OT assets were now governed inside a centralized CMDB with standardized identification, ownership, and lifecycle management. Automated ingestion eliminated the manual reconciliation that previously consumed engineering and security teams.
The ISA-95 model brought production-level context directly into asset records, allowing teams to understand not just what a device was, but what part of the business depended on it.
Security operations shifted from reactive vulnerability lists to contextualized risk management. Vulnerabilities were now prioritized based on their true impact on manufacturing operations, not just their technical severity score. Remediation workflows became structured, traceable, and measurable.
Cross-functional alignment improved dramatically. OT engineers, IT teams, and cybersecurity professionals began operating from a shared operational picture for the first time. Service desk teams could accurately route OT-related incidents. Managed services gained the visibility needed to monitor data health and integration stability proactively.
Most importantly, executive leadership gained confidence that OT risk was no longer hidden inside isolated tools. It could now be measured, governed, and improved using the same enterprise platform trusted across the business.
Summary
This initiative established a durable foundation for how operational technology is governed, secured, and scaled across the enterprise. By unifying OT visibility, vulnerability response, and data governance inside ServiceNow, the manufacturer moved from fragmented insight to an enterprise system of record that supports operational resilience, cyber risk management, and future digital transformation.
With OT now fully integrated into the organization's broader service management strategy, the company is positioned to expand across additional sites, introduce more advanced automation, and continuously mature its security posture, without rebuilding its foundation each time.
The result is a manufacturing environment that is not only more visible, but more secure, more resilient, and better aligned to business outcomes.
