The Benefits of Change Management in Industrial Automation Workflows

The first thing we have to address is “what is change management?” This is fairly simple. It’s the way operators manage alterations to code that affect how equipment and processes are controlled, tracked, and archived. Now, this has long been an established practice in the world of software engineering – in the IT world – where all kinds of complex changes in code are par for the course – That’s fundamentally what they do. However, in the OT world, change management practices have yet to be so fully adopted. That said, they are becoming increasingly important, and end users are paying more and more attention to them. That’s because, as our viewers certainly know, OT and IT are getting closer together – more sophisticated code and software intelligence is required to drive equipment, and, on top of that, users are being forced to navigate environments where they’re working with equipment from many different vendors and across many different locations. Well, in that environment, to ensure that the best quality code possible is implemented uniformly in all instances, change management is required.