Industrial DevOps Platform to boost manufacturing efficiency

The platform provides industrial operations with strategic advantages through continuous quality control, production optimisation, and pre-emptive crisis management. These capabilities help minimise product recalls, downtime, and safety or cyber threats, potentially saving millions in lost productivity.

Amazon recently implemented Copia’s technology in its warehouses, anticipating an 80% reduction in unexpected downtime due to unauthorised control changes, a substantial increase in the scalability of code improvements, and a 25% improvement in resolving high-severity issues. Since 2020, Copia has raised $30 million from investors and has been adopted by more than 1,500 developers across 100 companies globally.

"We're going beyond increasing efficiency to fundamentally transform how the manufacturing industry operates where the application of code is a strategic asset to enhance efficiency and foster innovation,” said Copia CEO and Co-founder Adam Gluck. “By deploying the principles of Industrial DevOps, manufacturers can bring established IT practices into the world of operational technology to ensure their operations run smoothly with minimum downtime.”

Industrial automation challenges

Operational outages are common occurrences, causing severe disruptions that can halt plant operations and jeopardise the integrity of entire industrial systems. When a Toyota computer system in Japan malfunctioned in August 2023, production was halted in 14 factories for a full day, costing the company an estimated $356 million in revenue.

Quick-fix engineering updates and localised modifications to automated manufacturing processes are commonly used as short-term solutions but there is no way to detect and validate these ad hoc code changes.

With no way to trace or account for these changes, conflicting operations can occur leading to expensive production failures that require huge amounts of time to investigate and resolve.

Copia brings many of the concepts, tools, and best practices that helped DevOps revolutionise the IT industry (e.g. visibility, automation, validation, and quality control) to the operational technology industry. Mitigation with Industrial DevOps, modern practices and toolsets provide unprecedented visibility and control over industrial code in development, production, and management throughout project lifetimes. As coding at scale increases at industry sites, Copia offers enhanced code visibility to:

• Enable greater collaboration among coders
• Provide a one-stop platform for all files and upgrades
• Boost efficiency by standardising code and upgrades across multiple sites
• Supply actionable visibility and control, and immediate disaster recovery