Overview

CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment) can significantly enhance manufacturing software deployments by speeding up implementation, testing, and deployment. Despite the benefits, adoption in manufacturing has lagged due to traditional practices and the unique challenges of the shop floor. Modernizing MES platforms with CI/CD principles and architectures like containerization and microservices can overcome these hurdles, reducing downtime and improving reliability. Continue reading for a more in depth look at CI/CD in manufacturing.

Bridging the Gap: CI/CD in Manufacturing Software Deployments

CI/CD is a concept very familiar to business software developers but still largely foreign to shop floor digitalization initiatives. Let's explore what CI/CD means, why its adoption in manufacturing software deployments has lagged, and how applying CI/CD principles has enormous potential to speed up implementation, testing, and deployment in manufacturing environments.

Understanding CI/CD

CI/CD can be divided into two aspects. CI (continuous integration) involves automatically and frequently integrating code changes into a shared source code repository. As updates are made, automated testing steps are executed to ensure the reliability of merged code changes.

Continuous delivery refers to the automation of releasing validated code as a production-ready build, allowing the operations team to quickly deploy an application to production. Continuous deployment takes this a step further, automating the release of changes to production, where the changes are immediately accessible to end users.

Adoption of CI/CD allows a team of multiple developers to work in parallel, reduces the likelihood of introducing bugs that break the production system, and streamlines the deployment of large enterprise software applications. So, why has manufacturing software lagged in adopting these benefits?

Challenges in Manufacturing Software Deployment

Traditionally, deploying a manufacturing software application involves installing a platform (such as a monolithic manufacturing execution system or MES), configuring it based on the site's physical layout and operation, performing factory and/or user acceptance testing, and then going live in production. Many companies establish one central environment per site to ease management complexity and reduce infrastructure costs but often neglect the challenges of incorporating future changes or enhancements and testing those directly in production without unforeseen impacts.

Additionally, the personnel responsible for configuring and managing the MES tend to be more process or shop floor-centric rather than software-centric. These resources are not software developers and are far removed from modern software management best practices.

MES implementations possess connectivity to a wide array of shop floor and external systems. Testing a system 'live' in production may be viewed as the only way of synchronizing all the data handoffs required.

The Limitations of Traditional MES Approaches

MES applications historically limit options for integrating CI/CD practices. Configuration and testing must be performed manually, automation of configuration or deployment tasks is often non-existent, and testing scenarios must be tediously staged and manually executed.

A move toward a development/QA/production infrastructure is a step in the right direction that many manufacturing operations have taken. Configuration is performed in a development environment or 'sandbox', migrated to a QA environment for factory/user acceptance testing and integration testing, and once confirmed, migrated to production. This architecture minimizes the risk of production impact due to bad configuration or a patch/release that introduces unforeseen issues, albeit at the expense of resource and infrastructure overhead. However, human error in duplicating manual configuration and deployment steps across environments often still leads to production issues. Companies struggle to ensure that QA and production are mirrors of each other, potentially negating testing efforts.

Modernizing MES with CI/CD

Modernizing MES software platforms with CI/CD practices greatly enhances efficiency and reliability. Many MES platforms are shifting towards containerized, microservice-based architectures, enabling independent deployment, starting, stopping, and upgrading of modules. This reduces the risk of a single bug affecting the entire system. Automation with infrastructure-as-code methods further minimizes human error in deployments across development, QA, and production environments.

Traditional deployment required significant downtime or manual fallback processes, but containerization supports zero downtime deployments by allowing seamless module swaps. Cloud-based environments support 24/7 operations, eliminating the need for physical infrastructure upgrades and streamlining deployments.

MES vendors are also improving configuration management with CI/CD principles. They offer global templates for consistent configuration across facilities, and file-based configurations allow for versioning, isolation, comparison, and merging using traditional software tools. Automated unit testing frameworks ensure configuration changes do not introduce issues, and any problems can be quickly isolated and resolved using versioned change histories.

Looking Ahead

Some may view the incorporation of these practices as introducing unnecessary complexity, which may be true for a simplistic, pilot initiative. However, as organizations continue to move toward adopting shop floor digitalization in a mission-critical, enterprise capacity, the ability of the selected technology stack to promote rather than hinder CI/CD practices is essential. This ensures quality, uptime, and the system's ability to grow to fulfill new use cases and solve new manufacturing challenges in the years to come. When evaluating platforms and associated service providers, it is crucial to ask how they promote modern enterprise software management principles as part of platform deployment, including the use of CI/CD.

In summary, embracing CI/CD in manufacturing is not just a technical upgrade; it's a strategic move towards a more agile, reliable, and future-ready operation.