The manufacturing process requires consistent updates to keep up with the momentum and staying ahead of any competition. The whole industry is pressed to produce more at lower costs. Underlying network infrastructure has to be stable, robust and simple by nature at the same time.
Apart from that, the manufacturing plant needs to be well secured against malicious attacks. Otherwise, the company may lose some of its revenue or even reputation, and no one can really put a price on that.
When operating large scale automated manufacturing sites, the capacity required to administer the network grows greatly and it's more prone to undetected threats. By early discovering inconsistencies and weak spots in the network and security infrastructure, we may remarkably prolong the ecosystem's uptime and increase reliability in the long term.