BACKGROUND
Our client is a food manufacturing company providing products for well-known consumer packaged goods brands as well as chain restaurants and delivery service meals. Their operations require the integration of IOT devices and production equipment into their ERP systems to service over 4 warehouse-production locations and 400+ employees. The includes manufacturing traceability and product quality testing.
PROBLEM
The scale of our client’s operation had begun to grow exponentially along with the complexity of many system-code modules. Due to the rapid pace of growth, our client was faced with a corresponding increase in IT and application development workload. The complexity of the application along with the requirement to continually support a 24-hour production cycle proved to be a challenge for the limited developer staff to manage both workload and attempts to onboard new technical staff.
SOLUTION
KTI worked with the organization to reduce our client’s technical debt to manageable levels. Our experienced developers and operations analysts performed a structured code review with a manageable collaborative schedule that minimized the workload on our client’s developer. During our code review – we produced an operational runbook which included all details required to replicate the application environment with a CI/CD(continual integration/continual deployment) workflow. This included an in-depth review of the application code in relation to operational functions. We also provided a first line of support via a ticketing system to triage and manage operational issue tickets.
RESULTS
Our development operations and runbook provided a consistent way to train new developer and technical staff. This offset the lead developer workload significantly to allow for normal operation and expansions to continue. Our team has onboarded several new support staff (both internal to our client’s operations and our own) and now provides support for over 95% of operational issue tickets or application extension requests. The overall operational stability of the system and the team required to support it has been greatly increased. Our systems documentation has also provided a consolidated knowledgebase for future plans to upgrade legacy systems into modern technologies such as Microsoft Dynamics ERP.
CONCLUSION
KTI’s technical expertise in a wide variety of code-languages and platforms helped our client to stabilize their technical operations and prepare for continual growth. Creating a formal development operations process along with detailed documentation allows your development requirements to be spread to more team members to alleviate overburdened staff.
