Scale your applications with a factory approach

The Industrial Revolution saw factories dramatically boost manufacturing productivity. Amid the digital revolution, a factory approach to application development can spark similar acceleration.

Machinery created new possibilities for manufacturing goods. In physical factories, products move from machine to machine, each responsible for one task, such as mixing, cooking, cooling and packaging in a food manufacturing plant. Similarly, an application factory approach breaks app creation into repeatable individual actions that speed production and streamline management.

This approach aims to satisfy customer and employee demands by simplifying the creation of applications in a unified and standardized way. It unites solutions, processes, tooling and people so your organization can deliver new applications efficiently.

This method for application modernization prioritizes building once and repeatedly deploying reusable components, shared services, global best practices, processes, transformation modernization techniques and security-minded building blocks. For example, once you develop and test a secure login module, you can reuse it in every new application without rebuilding from scratch. This approach creates several compelling advantages for your organization.

Driving scalability and other application advantages

An application factory offers benefits similar to manufacturing. You can produce your product – in this case, applications – faster and more consistently. This method works at scale because you build applications once and keep iterating on that blueprint for future app deployments. Think of it as developing a proven blueprint — once built, it can be applied again and again to accelerate delivery, reduce costs and maintain consistency. This speeds up time to market and ensures consistency in application quality, security and performance.

This scalability means your systems adapt to changing workloads and user requirements and increases in data, users and traffic without compromising reliability or speed. As processing needs change, scalable systems automatically adjust application performance and cost. By ensuring cohesion across platforms and solutions, you unify your objectives and align your functional experts and resources.

While scalability is a significant advantage, the benefits of an application factory approach extend beyond development. Centralizing the capabilities required to deliver applications increases application quality, automation and speed.

• Enhance the customer experience by responding to customer demands more effectively.
• Accelerate application development and deployment.
• Decrease security vulnerabilities during development because of the application factory’s built-in security practices.
• Facilitate the modernization of applications and processes.
• Ensure consistency with your practices and components across the organization.
• Boost your reputation and standing within the industry by demonstrating the ability to scale applications effectively.

You can achieve these results by centralizing application management services and practices, but first, you must put the right components in place.

Components of a successful application factory

Organizations seek to scale operations efficiently, making the application factory approach attractive. Teams adopt this method because it creates better consistency, flexibility and aligned resources under one overarching application management structure.

To build your own factory, start with the basics. Just as a physical factory is filled with machines, each serving a unique purpose and contributing to the entire process and creation of a company’s product. It also relies on logistics and a larger set of processes to get those goods to consumers. An application factory is structured with several reusable components. 

• Shared services to promote efficiency and collaboration across projects
• Global best practices for processes, transformations, modernization techniques and security measures
• Robust solutions, streamlined processes and efficient tooling
• A global team of competent people working together to accelerate innovation and improve delivery excellence
• Teams organized by capabilities and industry domains to operate at scale
• An effective office infrastructure that contributes to the functioning of the application factory
• Centralized management of solutions, processes and tooling so you can respond to customer demands more efficiently

Incorporate these components to establish a robust, efficient application factory that enhances productivity, quality and responsiveness to market demands.

Streamline your application approach

Your business applications connect your customers and employees to services, allow employees to manage their tasks and enable your organization to automate processes. Adopting an application factory approach can keep your app development and management agile and secure.

Learn how Unisys can guide you in aligning your applications with your business objectives and explore an Emerson division’s success story with modernizing and migrating applications to the cloud.