Who Doesn’t Want to Improve Utilization and Efficiency in Test Facilities?

As organizations seek to get more out of every asset and bring products to market more quickly, I’ve had the opportunity to work with test facility operators and managers in the R&D environment who are beginning to use metrics that were once applied primarily to production environments. As they seek to maximize the utilization of their test facility, including equipment and personnel, they need to clearly identify business unit and test program goals, understand operational costs, and define and document customer/product requirements.

Using Total Test Optimization (TTO) as a methodology, I am part of an ACS team that works with clients to analyze and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their testing processes – from work order generation through test setup and execution – to data acquisition and data management. For companies who deploy continuous improvement initiatives or for those who want to use test data to make decisions about their products faster and more efficiently, TTO provides an opportunity to reduce lead time for testing and data collection and analysis. One of our customers recently had the opportunity to increase cell utilization by minimizing engine changeover time. The TTO analysis my team performed focused on the reduction of setup time to positively impact total cycle time from one test to the next.

To learn more about TTO and the recent project, read our article featured in Automotive Testing Technology International.