What manufacturing can learn from IT DevOps success
Manufacturing Automation Leaders and Controls Engineering teams are under constant pressure to keep operations lean and to respond faster to market changes as they navigate a critical transformation period. Many face productivity challenges during a time when labor is scarce, budgets are tight, and manual processes continue to create risks of human error and unintended downtime.
As it turns out, IT organizations are confronting similar hurdles, yet the sector is faring better when it comes to boosting its productivity levels. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor productivity in the manufacturing industry was up 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2024. Compare that to software development circles, which are hitting new benchmarks when it comes to productivity and the ability to produce product at scale--in this case, the agile delivery of new code releases.
While code development is just one piece of the overall manufacturing automation puzzle, it can have a significant impact on agility, quality, efficiency, and other critical KPIs. Getting coding right on the operational side, therefore, is important for unlocking productivity.
What is the secret to IT developers’ more prolific and efficient work? Much of the progress can be tied to the rise of DevOps, a methodology that removes silos by closely aligning development, quality assurance, and operations teams to innovate, execute, and deliver faster. While software organizations are still evolving their DevOps practices, the benefits are clear: improvements in time to market, customer experience, operational efficiency, and business growth. This results in an exponential impact across the organization.
from 2024 DORA Report from Google Cloud
DevOps practices are elevating IT’s game, helping to produce better deliverables much faster— DevOps is essential for pushing code to market faster and for improving deployment frequency. With DevOps practices unlocking such productivity advantages for IT, it only makes sense that tying the approach to Operational Technology (OT) code development can deliver similar benefits.
“By 2027, 80% of organizations will incorporate a DevOps platform into their tooling to reduce complexity and streamline software delivery, up from 25% in 2023.”
Gartner Magic Quadrant for DevOps Platforms, 2024
The prolific growth in DevOps adoption across the software industry indicates that it is a matter of time until Industrial DevOps becomes as commonplace as TPS (Toyota Production System) throughout the manufacturing and distribution sectors. That said, there isn’t a 1:1 mapping between IT and OT processes, and manufacturing and controls engineers do face more logistical obstacles when it comes to software development and maintenance.
While optimizing coding practices won’t address large-scale productivity gaps in areas like supply chain, for example, a focus on OT code development can and does move the needle as you can see in this case study from Amazon, where they expect to cut PLC-driven downtime by 80% through the application of Industrial DevOps. Considering that industrial code issues account for 50% of all downtime, you can begin to imagine the impact across automation operations.
Operational Technology (OT) departments, who have generally been slower to transform coding practices compared to IT, can draw on certain DevOps principles to drive productivity advances that go beyond more efficient code. Among key takeaways:
- Increased collaboration. Automation initiatives are notorious for silos—pockets of systems focused on a specific task or manufacturing role, yet lacking visibility into other systems and data. By borrowing DevOps practices such as systems thinking and shared goals along with modern tools such as Git-based source control, automation and controls engineers can break down barriers and drive seamless collaboration across disparate teams. This facilitates more timely system updates and can help optimize production cycles.
- Mitigate downtime. Applying the DevOps focus on end-to-end visibility to OT functions can help organizations identify and respond to issues earlier in the cycle. By mitigating problems before they metastasize, OT organizations lower the risk of both downtime and quality issues, both critical for keeping costs in check. Having visibility into the when and why of code changes also ensures organizations can recover more quickly in the event of operational disruptions.
- Organize for output. With DevOps, culture is critical to delivering technical capabilities and reaching optimal performance. Building a culture that formalizes processes so employees can easily distribute tasks creates flexibility and promotes user-centricity. This also encourages knowledge sharing, which can lead to increased output. According to the 2023 DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) Report from Google Cloud, teams with generative cultures achieve 30% higher organizational performance leveraging DevOps.
The DevOps journey has matured quickly, and it’s clear that it’s delivering exponential improvement in software developer productivity, especially with the compounding of AI. The time is now for OT to adopt Industrial DevOps practices to gain a competitive edge through increased productivity, driving growth in margins and the business as a whole.
