Panasonic Electric Works Company: Elevating quality and efficiency with IAR’s CI/CD solutions

Empowering innovation in a demanding market

As a global leader in integrated electrical and digital solutions, the Panasonic Electric Works Company is renowned for its commitment to quality and innovation. Yet, even the most advanced organizations face challenges when market demands intensify and product complexity grows. For Panasonic Electric Works, the need to balance rapid development without compromising quality became a strategic imperative, one that required a new approach to software development and lifecycle management.

The challenge: Sustaining excellence amid market pressures

Panasonic Electric Works’s products power everything from homes and offices to stadiums and public infrastructure. The main business domains consist of four pillars: Lighting, electrical construction materials, environmental energy, and solution engineering.

With such a broad impact, even minor market-quality issues can have significant consequences. Despite rigorous engineering and evaluation, it’s only in real-world environments that certain challenges are revealed. Panasonic Electric Works’s leadership set out to achieve two critical goals: a continuous, agile response to market issues and a step-change in development efficiency. Against this backdrop, Panasonic Electric Works began considering the introduction of CI/CD as a strategic initiative to improve quality and optimize their development process.

Previously, they tried to implement a CI/CD environment with open-source tools like Jenkins, but the administrative burden prevented organization-wide adoption. This showed that long-term maintainability, structured support, and the ability to leverage existing assets are crucial for success at scale.

The Solution: A strategic partnership with IAR

In 2024, Panasonic Electric Works undertook a comprehensive re-evaluation of its development workflow. Already a user of the IAR compiler, Panasonic Electric Works saw an opportunity to build on this foundation by introducing a CI/CD environment tailored for long-term success. IAR’s proposal stood out for its focus on:

• Seamless integration with existing tools and assets
• Long-term maintenance and support, including legacy compiler versions
• High performance, broad architecture support, and a robust global support framework

For Panasonic Electric Works, whose products remain in the market for years, these capabilities were decisive. The partnership with IAR was not just about technology, it was about ensuring continuous product maintenance and future-proofing their development process.

Implementation: Rapid progress, real results

Collaboration between IAR and Panasonic Electric Works was a key aspect of the deployment. IAR’s team took the time to fully understand Panasonic Electric Works's existing development mechanism, ensuring that the transition to the new CI/CD workflow was aligned with established practices and requirements. This methodical approach enabled a smooth and effective implementation, minimizing disruptions and facilitating rapid adoption within Panasonic Electric Works's development teams.

Today, Panasonic Electric Works leverages IAR Build Tools for Arm, the command-line toolchain that enables automated embedded software development across key product lines, including sensor terminals and system controllers. The results are already tangible:

• Accelerated development cycles and faster time to market
• Enhanced development efficiency and team productivity
• Sustainable, continuous product maintenance, ensuring quality over the product’s entire lifecycle

Panasonic Electric Works is now well on its way to achieving a development workflow that delivers both quality and efficiency in development.

A partnership for the future

Panasonic Electric Works values IAR not just as a technology provider, but as a strategic partner. The ability to propose solutions that align with Panasonic Electric Works’s objectives and the commitment to long-term collaboration have been key to the partnership’s success. Panasonic Electric Works looks forward to IAR’s continued leadership in advancing software development environments, helping customers move beyond high-performance compilers to holistic, future-ready solutions.

Advice to industry peers

Panasonic Electric Works’s journey offers valuable lessons for other enterprises facing similar challenges. As Panasonic Electric Works notes:

IAR’s extensive domestic and international customer case studies, combined with insights into current technology trends, provided highly effective guidance in addressing organizational challenges. This knowledge enabled us to reassess our development processes while achieving measurable improvements in quality.

Panasonic Electric Works Group believes that other companies facing similar challenges can play a significant role in enhancing overall industry productivity by actively adopting new workflows and tools. By continuing to focus on both quality and efficiency in close collaboration with IAR, Panasonic Electric Works aims to further strengthen its development processes and maintain a balanced approach that meets evolving industry demands.