TEST RIG Utilization For The Lab AND Manufacturing Floor

View Utilization By Lab Location, Type, Product

Schedule Use Of Test Systems To Optimize Ops
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Use Trend Information To Plan New Purchases

      Optimal utilization of test systems drives more cost effective operations in the test lab and improves visibility for budgeting and future capital expenditures.  The challenge is that many lab environments aren’t able to easily collect data, track usage, and make the necessary steps to implement data driven tools to help balance usage and optimize their lab.  GradientOne’s Test Rig Tracker & Scheduler is designed to help customers make decisions to improve their testing throughput while managing spend on test infrastructure.
      Our approach to building this solution is guided by three basic principles:

1. Simple deployment
2. Do not disrupt the Test Engineer’s existing workflow
3. Kill multiple birds with one stone:  help both the engineering and finance team​

      This blog post will provide background into how it works, how to use it, and the various problems it can solve for your test infrastructure.

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How It Works
      Getting started is simple.  An engineer logs into their GradientOne web interface (Figure 1), registers a Test Rig with the following information:

• Test Rig Name
• Test Rig Type
• Location
• Lab
• Description

All of this information is indexed and made available for tracking, reporting, and trend analysis.

Figure 1

After a Test Rig is registered, the GradientOne Agent is provisioned and installed on the Test Rig.  The Agent operates in the background.  It activates itself upon Test Rig bootup and reports to the GradientOne cloud platform usage of the test rig and provides integration into the scheduling system, with no involvement required by the Test Engineer.

Figure 2

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The Summary page (Figure 2) provides a global, comprehensive view of all Test Asset utilization information.  Filter and sort to customize views (Figure 3) based off test rig type, location, product line usage, and more.

Figure 3

View Test System utilization trends to plan for future purchases.  Figure 4 shows increasing weekly utilization of a test system, alerting Engineering management of the need to procure a new system, aligning capital expense with business demand.

Figure 4

Figure 5

Scheduling is integrated to book Test Rig use for your teams.  Test Engineers can check in/checkout test rigs.  Test Labs can book Test Rig time and allocate it to specific customer engagements.