DevOps

Dubow Textile describes its business as a “technology company that just happens to decorate garments and hard goods.” Since the company was founded in 1991, it’s been continually investing in new ways to automate its processes and improve the way it interacts with vendor and customer systems. Those innovations have paid off. Today the company is a global custom decorator that produces 10-12 million products a year.

Over the last 29 years, Dubow has turned to technology to drive every aspect of its operations.

“Dubow uses custom-built technology to control the movement of all of our products and customer orders,” said Kelly Landowski, Director of Customer Solutions. “Our customers integrate their orders directly into our systems, so it’s pretty much a hands-free process that eliminates errors.”

The company also uses custom software to receive and organize raw products coming into the facilities, manage orders throughout the decorating process, create reports and invoices, and track the finished products through delivery. “We’re always looking for new technology to smooth out any lumps in the road,” said Kelly.

When Dubow’s previous development team added new features and functionality, there was always the risk of something else breaking, which caused costly slowdowns in production.

With several custom software programs to manage and a seemingly endless list of new features to incorporate into those programs, Dubow wanted a better way to make software updates.

Capmation uses a practice called DevOps (software development and IT operations) to deploy safe, well-tested code to different environments in an automated way. Like its name implies, DevOps is a combination of development and operations because it removes the barriers between those traditionally siloed teams. By incorporating DevOps practices and tools, Kelly said Capmation helps Dubow make updates faster and more effectively.

“Having a test environment definitely improved the overall experience of adding new processes to our system,” she said. “There’s always the fear that you’re going to install one thing and something else is going break. Now we’re able to test every single feature prior to putting it into production, which saves so much time,” she said.

Kelly said before DevOps was built into the process, updates would be put into development that could slow or stop production.

“In this business, you can’t have downtime. Now, we can test a new process in our environment and tell right away if it’s going to work. It allows us to see firsthand how the functionality is going to perform and decide if it’s meeting our expectations.

If it doesn’t, we can pull that feature out right away and come up with something that works better. All of this happens without affecting production,” she added.

DevOps also gives the Dubow team the ability to play with the test software and see if there are any additional features that should be added before they do a full install.

“Many times we thought we were making the only changes we needed only to realize we needed additional tweaks or features to make the process more efficient,” Kelly said.

Having DevOps is just one reason she feels grateful for Dubow’s partnership with Capmation.

“David and his team are hands on and responsive. He gives really good feedback and steers us in the right direction. They’re not a company that just does something because we ask for it. They truly want what’s best for Dubow Textile,” she concluded.

• Automates the software deployment work flow and all aspects of testing
• Increases speed and frequency of deployment
• Improves the quality and security of end product