Strategies for Optimizing Today’s Test Engineering Organizations
senior vice president of sales and marketing
Test managers face multiple challenges in meeting product quality and test requirements with limited resources. For more than a decade, National Instruments has worked with test engineering managers from numerous industries to develop strategies for overcoming these challenges. Those efforts have produced the NI Test Manager Program, an initiative designed to help you gain business and technical insight through peer discussions with NI experts and leading test managers throughout the world. The Test Manager Program shows you how to optimize your test organization through strategies that include increasing test throughput and reuse between validation and production test; taking advantage of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies and obsolescence planning; and standardizing your test system to reduce costs.
Examples of the Available Business and Technology Resources
Business impact case studies are published reports that detail the challenges, strategies, and measured impact of industry-leading companies that have collaborated with NI. These case studies can help you refine your test strategy. Below is an excerpt from an NI business impact case study.
Company: Hella KGaA Hueck & Co.
Industry: Automotive
Objective: Reducing production test costs
"Global production test standardization allows Hella to maintain its high product quality in a cost-effective and scalable manner. National Instruments was an integral partner in this effort, helping us realize a 46 percent reduction in operational test cost and savings of an additional investment of a million euros every year."
– Michael Follmann, Executive Vice President, Electronics Operations
Greater visibility into industry trends can help you plan for the future. NI cast a wide net in terms of the inputs including academic research, business intelligence, user surveys, online forums, customer advisory board feedback, and field sales discussions. This broad base creates a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data to draw on. The most recent NI report is the Automated Test Outlook, which discusses the following topics:
- Standardization
- Multichannel RF Test
- Peer-to-Peer Computing
- Embedded Design and Test
- Reconfigurable Instruments
NI continually interviews and audits leading test engineering teams to document strategies and best practices that increase efficiency and effectiveness of test engineering teams. Below are examples of best practice recommendations NI has published externally.
Guest Commentary Series – Test & Measurement World
By Richard McDonell, Senior Group Manager, National Instruments
Recent articles include:
- "Do You Know Your True Cost of Test?"
- "Standardization – What Does It Really Mean?"
- "How Do You Treat Test Like a Product?"
Testing the Limits Column – Electronic Design
By Eric Starkloff, Vice President of Product Marketing, National Instruments
Recent articles include:
- "Use a Model-Based Design Test Process for Your Smart Devices"
- "Generate Profits through Test"
- "Test Faces the Knowledge Gap"
