Two factors cause manufacturers to lose $126 million per shutdown

Copia Automation, a provider of industrial DevOps platform technology, has released its first annual State of Industrial DevOps report. Industrial DevOps applies IT DevOps principles and practices (such as visibility, automation, validation, and quality control) to operational technology (OT) in industrial environments. The company says it is “the first study of its kind on the application of IT DevOps principles and practices in the industrial sector.”

According to the report, which surveyed 200 executives from companies with revenues ranging from $300 million to more than $15 billion, industrial coding errors cause an average of 30 hours of production downtime, costing $4.2 million per hour and $126 million per downtime. Half of all downtime is caused by industrial code changes, code ambiguity, lack of industrial code visibility and programmable logic controller (PLC) issues.

The study also highlights significant OT vulnerabilities—the software and hardware that controls industrial devices. A possible cause of these vulnerabilities, according to the Copia report, is ad hoc fixes in industrial programming, with 79% of respondents saying they are common.

Copia found that while “these quick fixes can temporarily restore functionality, they often leave organizations vulnerable to breaches because changes are not tracked. This makes it difficult or impossible to reliably maintain security updates. With thousands of devices managed by manufacturers, the cascading effect of unmonitored changes can be significant.”

“With coding errors and cybersecurity breaches as significant causes of downtime, manufacturers need to take every technological measure possible to protect their bottom line and ensure business continuity with increased productivity,” said Adam Gluck, co-founder and CEO of Copia. “Industrial DevOps provides the technology and process change to do this.”

Key survey findings:

The most common causes of unplanned downtime are cybersecurity breaches (47%), followed by hardware failures (45%), coding/software issues (41%), human error (32%) and environmental disasters (25%).
Respondents spend on average 10 times more time (45 hours per month) debugging code than reviewing it.
The average percentage of downtime due to code changes is higher for companies with more industrial facilities (65% for 76–99 facilities) compared to companies with fewer facilities (31% for 11–25 facilities).
While 97% of respondents are aware of the industrial DevOps approach and see its potential benefits, 44% cited competing priorities as the biggest barrier to implementation, followed by lack of management interest (39%).