Manufacturing Without a Warehouse = Development Without an Artifact Repository

February 11, 2016 By Manfred Moser

2 minute read time

Can you imagine a large manufacturer like Toyota, Samsung or General Electric managing all their parts without one or numerous warehouses? Probably not, because it's simply inefficient or even impossible to manage.

No matter if you are making computers, cars, toys or any other physical products. Parts are everywhere. You receive them from external partners and vendors, you assemble some, you send others away for modifications, assemble more and then ship them to customers. You would never be able to do all that efficiently without a warehouse and a dedicated management system. The warehouse manages receiving, sending and everything in between. Even with lean business models there is always a need to manage your parts and store them. And the system better be optimized for the purpose. You need to know what goods are where, how many there are, how heavy and big they are for packing and shipping and so on.

The same applies for manufacturing software. To avoid inefficient development practices, you need to manage all the parts involved. Amazingly many organizations still hobble along with little to no control over their development parts. Yet solutions exist and organizations using them are achieving measurable efficiency gains. The warehouse for software development is called a repository manager and here are a few of the benefits for using one.

  • Increasing developer productivity and collaboration with dedicated local storage for all components - proprietary, open source, or 3rd party.
  • Accelerating continuous and DevOps goals with a single repository to manage all assets related to development and delivery.
  • Improving performance and stability for builds and other component users.
  • Improving component selection resulting in higher quality applications and less unplanned work.

If you are not convinced yet, I’ve got just what you need. Check out this new whitepaper about the “Concepts and Benefits of Repository Management”.

This will help you quickly take action. From here you can download, install and adopt Nexus Repository with a free 14 day trial and experience the benefits of a repository first hand.

Tags: artifact repository, Software Supply Chain, Nexus, binary repository, Nexus Repository, Open Source, Devops, repository management

Written by Manfred Moser

Manfred is a former author, trainer, and community advocate at Sonatype. He speaks regularly at conferences such as JavaOne, OSCON, DevOpsDays. He is a long time open source developer and contributor.