🚀 The Era of Continuous Improvement in Industrial Software!

[Mucitler Elektrik]

Fifteen years ago, an industrial organization would purchase a software system and expect it to last for decades. This timeline affected every part of the process: gathering requirements could take a year or more, building the software often took several years, and training could take another 18 months.

But all that time was a good investment because the software system was long-lived. It would measurably improve operations and continue to do so for years. It made sense to be 99% sure of what you wanted before you started to move forward.

That world no longer exists. Consider releasing a piece of software now that you started scoping in 2021, before the launch of ChatGPT. The pace of change in technology means that expecting a software system to last for decades is no longer realistic; which means spending years to develop a piece of software is no longer reasonable.

Instead, industrial leaders can apply the continuous improvement mindset they use to drive most of their operations to software. In this post, I’ll explain what that looks like and the benefits for industrial organizations that do it.

🤔 Why Aren’t Industrial Organizations Applying a Continuous Improvement Mindset to Software?​

First, industrial organizations are great at continuous improvement in some areas: training, safety, machine upgrades. The problem isn’t a lack of continuous improvement, it’s that most industrial organizations haven’t yet extended that mindset to their software infrastructure.

Why? I suspect there are two main reasons. First, software is much less visible than things on the factory floor. The team gets new welding goggles, and you can see the accident-free days go up. You can see the competitive value of a new piece of pulling equipment, which gets you to customers two days earlier.

It’s harder to see what the software provides. Perhaps it was the software that made it possible to realize that the old welding goggles were the highest priority PPE upgrade. Perhaps it was the software that identified the reduced pulling time as a customer-facing metric with a huge ROI. But it’s possible that only a handful of people know that, or see the role the software played.

The other thing is that many people in industrial environments interact with software at infrequent intervals. In that case, the software itself feels newer and less familiar. There’s more struggle to use it correctly.

The experience for an employee is that just as they start to get used to one piece of software, they’re asked to switch to a new one.

This means that the positive business impacts remain invisible, and the negative impacts (like requiring unproductive training time) are what people experience. This contributes to software being seen as a cost center, not a driver of business value.

💡 What Does a Continuous Improvement Mindset Look Like for Software?​

People tend to manage risk and change in structures they see as more static. In industrial environments, software is often seen that way: durable and largely fixed. The instinct is to manage risk rather than look for opportunity.

To move toward a continuous improvement mindset, you need to think differently about software. With the tools available today, it often makes sense to build a system not with the expectation that it will last for decades, but for the needs of your organization today and a little beyond.

Taking that framework as your starting point, you can accelerate every part of the software development process, from requirements gathering to quality assurance. And of course, the actual code production part can move faster thanks to generative AI tools.

This is a business imperative for organizations operating in today’s reality. The technology available to us is advancing so quickly that building large programs designed for the long term often doesn’t make sense when they’ll be obsolete the day they’re released.

The second mindset shift is to actively connect your organization’s software to the business benefits it provides. Is the warehouse tracking app preventing out-of-range humidity and temperature, which prevents component parts from degrading, which would lead to product failures down the line?

Is the simplified billing system reducing manual errors for the administrative team? Is it getting customer approval for scheduled maintenance faster? All of these have a significant impact on the organization’s finances. Highlighting them in company updates and earnings reports helps reinforce that your software systems are drivers of enterprise value.

🚀 Why Should You Switch to a Continuous Improvement Mode for Software?​

Consider your safety program: it doesn’t make sense to wait five years and update all your safety procedures at once. First, you’d probably have a lot of preventable accidents. Second, it’s much harder for everyone to learn and retain 50 new protocols at once. More than that, your team can accomplish so much more if they’re healthy and safe.

Software is similar: when you improve iteratively instead of in dramatic bursts, you make it easier for your team to learn new things because they learn smaller changes more often. You make it possible to take advantage of opportunities that reinforce each other.

Perhaps you simplify billing codes and customer approvals, and you gain a few days out of each order cycle. Over a year, that gives you the ability to serve more customers, which increases revenue by, say, nine percent. What does that extra revenue give you the ability to do?

🧠 Embracing Continuous Improvement for Software Requires a Mindset Shift​

Given how quickly technology is advancing today, it’s no longer realistic to wait until we’re 99% sure of what software we need to build. Today, it’s possible to build something quickly, determine if it meets your needs, and iterate if it doesn’t.

When industrial organizations apply the same mindset to software that they bring to their safety practices, training programs, and machinery, they unlock a new area of growth and position themselves to adapt more quickly and successfully to today’s technology landscape.