Headquartered in Augsburg, Germany, KUKA is a global automation corporation with sales of around EUR 3.2 billion and around 14,200 employees. As a leading global supplier of intelligent automation solutions KUKA offers its customers everything from a single source: from robots and cells to fully automated, networked systems in markets as diverse as automotive, electronics, general industry, consumer goods, e-commerce/retail, and healthcare.
To effectively operate and dominate at a global scale in the intelligent automation industry, KUKA uses the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce has helped streamline their business processes in many ways, yet KUKA began to realise that there was still one area that was struggling – DevOps.
Despite a relatively small setup consisting of one org, two sandboxes, and a small team, KUKA began to experience frustrations with the release: “It was a very tough time to assure a smooth deployment, as often errors or issues would occur. It was challenging,” comments Daniel Stangl, Deployment Manager and Salesforce Administrator at KUKA.
Getting business-specific – releases at KUKA
Prior to Copado, KUKA managed their release process using JIRA. This consisted of creating user stories, followed by developers manually commenting on which APEX component got modified and tracking which one should be part of the next deployment. At the end of the three-week sprint, the team would take all named components out of the JIRA user stories and then start the deployment, with changesets or by files with the workbench.
This resulted in the occurrence of errors, as code had to be verified manually, and sandbox refreshes would cause the need for manual intervention and delay the deployment. This meant there was no consistent quality control or verification method, resulting in numerous errors and time lost, many times in the form of several hours or days.
To add to the growing frustrations and complexity of the setup, KUKA did not have a source of truth. This meant there was no version control, which resulted in frequent overwrites. This was further exacerbated by the lack of visibility and transparency, which only further increased the chance of error and loss of time.
“Sometimes we needed a refresh of our sandboxes after a production deployment, which meant 5-6 working days gone and the entire development team was blocked from doing any new work,” adds Stangl.
The team at KUKA knew this process could not continue and that something needed to change to be able to continue leading the charge in the intelligent automation industry. As a result, KUKA began evaluating DevOps tools and chose Copado.
Implementing a real solution
Following a thorough review of the market, Copado, was chosen for two specific reasons. The first was due to its native functionality, which meant the KUKA team could immediately begin working on the platform.
The second reason was Copado’s integration with third-party DevOps tools, such as JIRA, which would allow them to seamlessly integrate all their current work directly into the tool.
As soon as KUKA implemented Copado, the team began to see an immediate impact. KUKA began with the Copado – JIRA integration to get all their JIRA user stories synced to create user stories in Copado.
This meant that they began to change their process, as individual code or metadata changes no longer needed to get manually named on the JIRA user stories, as Copado took care of this automatically by having each user story represent any changes due to metadata. This immediately saved the team countless hours that had previously been spent manually tracking.
In addition, the “add metadata” functionality references the named component and the component itself gets automatically retrieved from the org. This meant that the team now has an overview of all touched components and can deploy based on user stories from org to org.
“We finally had an overview of multiple touched components and the flexibility to deploy user story based from org to org. This was huge.” adds Stangl.
Evolving business processes
After operating with these improved processes for a year and a half, KUKA decided to increase its release sophistication by implementing the use of GIT as a service provider for the repository.
Having a single source of truth allowed the team to create a version control process to further reduce the risk of overwriting or missing components. This enabled the team to have a complete view of the process and metadata. The team could now easily identify any issues before they arose as they deploy from one sandbox to another. This has drastically increased the ROI.
Prior to the use of Copado, the KUKA team executed around 400 components per deployment and required about 50 manual pre and postdeployment steps. After the adoption of Copado, the team saw an increase to 500 components with only 25 manual pre and post steps and then in 2019, an additional increase to 600 components with only 10 manual pre and post manual steps. This shows just how Copado has increased the quality and efficiency of their process.
“Copado helps us to identify potential conflicts and provide merge suggestions quickly,” concludes Stangl. “The auto-resolving functionality is already solving the most of all conflicts and only merge problems get into the scope. As the repository is the source of truth and stores each commit in different versions, we can see character by character or line by line what has been changed and what will get into a feature branch for deployment. With our current Copado setup, we have a full version-controlled process with little manual extra effort. A sprint deployment is done within two to six hours instead of six working days, and we now only refresh our boxes four times a year.”
Ultimately, Copado has enabled KUKA to implement a true DevOps process and eliminate the need for manual intervention. By adopting Copado as their DevOps tool, KUKA has seen both an increase in their velocity and quality of its releases. Copado enables them with the tools and visibility needed to stop errors before they arise, which, ultimately culminates in an improvement in user satisfaction. Copado has delivered a litany of benefits including a source of truth, version control, automation, increase in velocity and quality control.
