  At the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) where up to 90 beamlines can be
provided in the future, minimisation of workload for individual beamlines and
maximisation of knowledge about one beamline that can be applied to other
beamlines is essential to minimise the total complexity in beamline control.
Presented in this paper are our efforts to achieve these goals by composing
relatively simple utilities and mechanisms to automate tasks, and always
remembering to keep our automation solutions simple and clear. After an
introduction to our choice of basic software in EPICS-based beamline control,
the issues encountered in introducing package management to EPICS modules, as
well as our solutions to them, are presented; then the design and
implementation of our packaging system is concisely discussed. After a
presentation of our efforts to reduce the need for self-built multi-device
EPICS IOC applications by providing reusable modular IOC executables, our
implementation of easily maintainable multi-IOC setups through the separation
and minimisation of each user's IOC configurations is given. Finally, the
ongoing project of comprehensive beamline services at HEPS to further simplify
configuration management on multiple scales, ranging from individual beamline
devices to all beamlines at HEPS, is introduced.
