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(*source:TheTechnologyIndustriesofFinland) strategy and defined process for handling data also help your teams find data faster. Without a strategy, the engineers responsible for running the tests are left to decide on their own where data is stored and how it gets there. This often means that the data ends up on the test bench, where it may or may not be deleted after it is transferred to a USB drive or network drive. By defining how the data is ingested and transformed ahead of time, you make indexing and searching for it easier. Perhaps the R&D team wants to conduct a root cause analysis on why a particular product was sent back to them for rework multiple times and asks for all the data from every validation test run. Or maybe, years down the line, the team needs the original test data as part of a sustainment effort. These two cases and many more can result in hours of sifting through data to find exactly what the team needs. The power of data and a standard process grow more significant as your company’s teams start collaborating across different functions. When your company can easily connect requirements data and simulation data with test and systems data, even though the raw data is in different formats, V&V teams can explore and interpret the data more quickly, which lets them feed back information to R&D sooner, leading to faster iterations between revisions of a product.

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In summary, the benefits of setting up and defining a common process increase as you scale across the organization. However, if you start with your V&V teams, you can still achieve big efficiency gains and process improvements. Effective V&V processes make finding and using your data easier and faster and ensure your data can be used to notify and alarm your teams early.

Driving Efficiency When Building, Managing, and Maintaining Validation Test Systems

To drive efficiency, your V&V test team needs to build validation test systems as quickly and easily as possible. For that, you need a strategy that defines a standard framework for your team’s efforts. Without a strategy, you likely will end up with multiple systems built on different hardware and software because the test engineers building the system naturally default to whatever tool they prefer. This approach leads to test teams owning a lot of different types of expensive equipment that can’t easily be repurposed and integrated into new test setups. At least not without spending a lot of valuable time redeveloping code and learning how a specific piece of equipment needs to be interfaced to. Even if you are not repurposing equipment, maintaining a system that is built on software and hardware someone else preferred can be costly from both the monetary and time perspectives—especially if the person that built it has moved on to another role.

Troubleshooting a system that is not performing as expected can take up most of your team’s time and force team members to make risk versus quality decisions.

Stepping back, conducting a broader assessment, and standardizing how your team builds validation testers can make managing and maintaining your fleet of testers more efficient. For example, if your team is using a standard platform to build validation test systems, they share common knowledge on how to use and integrate instrumentation into a system. This enables a faster turnaround time when you need to stand up testers quickly. Your team can easily repurpose and reuse equipment from an old tester and understand exactly how to integrate it into the new system alongside new equipment. The biggest risk you face when standardizing on a platform is selecting an insufficient one. As you consider a platform, think about the long term—not just your current test requirements. Openness and flexibility are important features, along with a broad range of instrumentation options that can work with new and future technologies. You also need to control your instrumentation and build software-connected systems in a manner that makes you agile enough to implement changes faster. Depending on which industry you are in, you might not be able to fit all the instrumentation in one platform, which is why openness is such an important factor. Easily integrating specialty equipment as needed and using a platform that provides reliability and repeatability are key to capitalizing on the efficiency improvements both when standing up new test systems and maintaining them into the future. Though a test system’s hardware is important, you can also achieve improved efficiency by standardizing on an open, interoperable software approach that is used alongside defined coding rules and standards built into a common framework. A single test team may include members proficient in different programming languages. To increase efficiency, avoid limiting them to writing test steps in a single language. Instead, use common frameworks that can handle code from multiple languages. With a common framework featuring standard components, your test team can focus on building the actual test steps instead of building all the basic framework components each time the team needs a new tester. Emphasizing the talents of each team member while enabling team members to stand up testers faster leads to easier maintenance with a common software framework across all testers. To change the status quo and show how much value test teams can provide to your business, you must not overlook test systems. If done right, standardizing on a hardware platform and common software framework will reduce the time you need to build, manage, and maintain validation test systems. It will also give your test team more time to test your new products, enabling faster feedback to R&D, which means faster iterations on your product designs.

Increase Business Value

You can optimize hardware and software within or across your validation teams, but if you do not have the right process, you’ll never get the efficiency gains you are hoping for. Specific details around process and methodology are different for each team and company. Therefore, you should start with an assessment that can help pinpoint the areas with bottlenecks. This involves some high-level requirements to operate efficiently through processes. The first requirement is as simple as your team having access to the tools it needs. Standardizing on software tools for development and deployment doesn’t help if your team can’t access them. To reduce the cost of maintaining frameworks and software development tools, you can choose a commercial off-theshelf solution maintained by a third party. But if your test teams must undergo a cumbersome procurement or internal process to obtain a development license, then you lose some of your efficiency gains. You also need to consider how to onboard and train new hires on the tools you use to shorten their learning curve. All these requirements must be deliberated as part of your process so they are automatically fulfilled as you expand your team. Automation should also be a big part of your process. It allows you to eliminate the efficiency loss and potential errors that occur in manual processes. For example, as your team stands up and expands test systems, its members need to make tweaks to the test routines the team is running. Having traceability and insight into which test software is running on each test system can help your team quickly understand the performance of each system. Additionally, team members need to be able to remotely deploy new test software, receive alarm notifications, view test progress, and track utilization and calibration needs for each asset across all testers. In many cases, these are all still manual tasks, which are time-consuming. The less obvious benefit on the system side is that you are, by default, tracking metrics that can help you continually improve. For example, if you need to stand up a new tester, and you track your assets and their utilization, you can quickly determine if you have what you need, potentially eliminating an investment in new and costly instruments that take a long time to procure. With visibility into utilization and asset availability, test teams can make repurpose versus investment decisions sooner, making planning easier and avoid compromising an upcoming test or using your available resources on overinvesting in equipment. One of the most time-consuming tasks is post processing of the test results and corresponding test parameters that are captured during a test. As discussed earlier, standard formats can reduce some of the time spent on this, but the real efficiency gains come from automatically performing the same set of analysis routines on every product you test. You should assess how you can build a process around automated analysis and reporting by identifying the analysis routines you always perform on your test results. This means reports can be available in a matter of minutes and can be shared with R&D sooner, which accelerates design iterations. As a final note, you can speed up more than just the iterations within product design. As you start building your process with the right data structure and systems, you can derive insights in dashboards that can be shared with multiple functions. For example, you may want a dashboard that shows manufacturing team members how many tests have been completed for an upcoming product and estimates of when the product will be released for production. Or you may want an even higher level dashboard that you can share with executives showing how you are progressing on a new product. This is over the long term, but you can use and connect the data you have to provide insights to other teams, who can then build their own optimized workflows. This adds value across many parts of the business. In summary, your process needs to provide insights for your test team members based on the metrics that are important to them. As they find and correct issues, they can continually tweak and, therefore, improve over time, incrementally adding business value to the company. Additionally, as you start gaining insights, you can share these with other teams that can track and/or make decisions based on your insights. This provides a higher level of transparency into your operations, ultimately driving the right business decisions across your organization.