Publication Target Date: August 4
Submission Deadline: July 25
Article Working Title: How ERP Systems Became a Manufacturing Cybersecurity Risk
Editorial Brief: ERP systems sit at the center of manufacturing operations. They manage production schedules, inventory, order fulfillment, materials, costing, and shipment workflows. When ERP goes offline, production can slow or stop even if the OT network itself is unaffected. The dependency is structural and often underestimated: operators may lose job instructions, production sequencing, material visibility, output reporting, and shipment coordination.
The article should examine how ERP became a production dependency, what that means architecturally, and where the attack surface sits in manufacturing environments. It should keep ERP as the central focus while recognizing that risk often travels through connected systems such as MES, warehouse management, quality, identity, integration platforms, labeling, and supplier or customer portals. SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics have different exposure profiles and different relationships with the plant-floor systems they connect to.
Cloud migration has changed the dependency profile significantly. What was once primarily a network and application availability issue is now also an internet connectivity, identity, SaaS, API, and third-party resilience issue. The article should examine what manufacturers are doing to maintain production capability when ERP is unavailable, what degraded-mode operation looks like in practice, and how ERP dependency varies between discrete, batch, and continuous manufacturing environments.
