TestProNews Q4 - 2007
Enterprise Test Benefits from Business Intelligence Technologies
Business Intelligence: A broad category of technologies and applications for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data with the goal of helping enterprise users identify and solve problems, and make better, more informed business decisions. Business intelligence (BI) applications perform the activities of gathering, storing, and aggregating data; data mining; mathematical analysis; data visualization; querying and reporting; sharing and collaborating; and decision support.
Many BI applications are used by companies to analyze or manage the sales, marketing, financial, or human resources aspects of their business. Other BI applications focus on engineering, design, characterization, and manufacturing. One such BI application, Arendar, is used to store, analyze, and visualize test data, and generate and publish reports. Arendar delivers real-time information anytime, anywhere, through a Web browser, enabling you to optimize product performance, improve quality, increase productivity, and reduce costs.
What Are the Business Justifications for Using BI?
Business intelligence is used to improve the timeliness and quality of information, which enables you to gain better insight into your business operations. Empowered with this information allows you to make faster, more informed business decisions, giving you a potential advantage over your competitors. Business intelligence helps engineers and managers analyze and evaluate design and characterization data to determine which parameter adjustments are necessary to optimize their product designs.
BI systems gather data and provide a centralized repository for the data, enabling it to be accessed in a standard and consistent format. This enables users to make decisions based on current and historical data, producing better results than basing decisions on assumptions and guesswork. A BI system also enables collaboration between groups, facilitating better communication and increasing productivity.
Other key BI system features include information integration and visualization. Arendar incorporates BI technology that delivers real-time test results, reports, and other information to managers via a graphics display called a dashboard. The Arendar Dashboard performs functions similar to a car dashboard. Specifically, it reports key product performance and quality data from test systems used in design, characterization, validation, and manufacturing on a real-time basis. The BI dashboard provides you with access to powerful data analysis and reporting tools in a user-friendly, Web browser-based environment. Dashboards help facilitate organization-wide data analysis, reporting, and integrated decision making. BI systems also provide you with in-depth knowledge about your internal test operations, including product and test performance, asset utilization, yields, and product quality.
BI Technologies Deliver Real-World Solutions
VI Technology combines its knowledge of business intelligence technologies with industry and automated test expertise to create enterprise test solutions used to optimize product performance. The Arendar enterprise test software platform delivers four key business intelligence benefits: improved data gathering and aggregation; powerful data mining, analysis, and visualization; advanced but easy- to-use report generation; and enhanced information sharing and collaboration. Following are four real-world applications that demonstrate how Arendar enterprise test software incorporates BI technology to deliver tangible benefits to customers.
Data Gathering and Aggregation
A leading energy storage company headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, had a large number of existing product test and characterization systems. The company wanted to reduce the time and effort required to collect and aggregate the large volume of data generated during the characterization testing process. Each system generated and locally stored the test results in data files of different file formats. A significant amount of time was needed for an engineer to aggregate and analyze the test data and compile a report for a single product.
The solution was an Arendar enterprise test system implemented by VI Technology. Arendar automatically imports test data files from multiple test stations and aggregates the data into a centralized database, making test results available instantly to anyone in the organization through a standard Web browser. Managers plot data trends and perform analysis and calculations on the data. Before the Arendar system was implemented, an engineer took three days to compile a report for a single product. With the Arendar enterprise test system in place, generating reports for multiple products takes less than a minute.
Data Mining, Analysis, & Visualization
A leading consumer electronics company needed a system for testing and characterizing LCD monitors to optimize product performance and quality in their design process. The existing system required engineers to find and extract test data from multiple files and import the data into Microsoft Excel. Excel was used to perform specialized data analysis and generate a characterization report, which was a very inefficient and time consuming process.
The system developed by VI Technology uses Arendar to streamline data analysis and report generation. The Arendar data mining tools greatly simplify the task of aggregating the characterization data needed for analysis. Arendar’s extensibility and open architecture enabled VI Technology engineers to easily add in new analysis functions required for the characterization reports based on the company’s proprietary algorithms. The characterization reports, including custom data plots and graphs, can be viewed by managers at their desk through a Web browser without having to export confidential test data with the report, as was required with the previous Excel-based solution.
Advanced Report Generation
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.—a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, networking, and wireless markets—selected Arendar enterprise test software for its advanced integrated circuit (IC) characterization platform to help design engineers validate and characterize new silicon. Freescale design engineers rely on a myriad of characterization tests to ensure that ICs perform to specifications. The Arendar-based IC characterization platform significantly reduces the time and effort Freescale engineers spend sifting through reams of data, correlating results, and generating meaningful reports.
Arendar efficiently gathers and aggregates characterization test data, automatically generates detailed reports, and publishes the reports to a secure Web site. Engineers now can compile complex 180-page characterization reports in a matter of days, whereas compiling the same reports used to take a month. Design and test engineers securely access the characterization reports from anywhere in the company through a Web browser. In addition, Freescale engineers share results with OEMs who use Freescale ICs in their products. By eliminating the need to manually aggregate all the data required to create characterization reports, Arendar helped Freescale engineers significantly reduce the time it takes them to verify new silicon and greatly increase their productivity.
Sharing and Collaboration
A high-tech electronics company headquartered in Austin, TX, needed to share product development design information between several different engineering teams located around the world. Each R&D center has multiple test systems that perform characterization and verification testing on high-performance, mixed-signal ICs under development. Arendar provided a solution for sharing IC characterization test results and analysis between the different design groups. Arendar is used at each R&D center to capture characterization data, perform analysis, and transform data into useful information, which is shared between various engineering design teams across the company Intranet. Having immediate access to characterization test reports has increased communication, collaboration, and productivity between the design groups, reducing product development times.
Conclusions
Automated test and characterization systems generate tremendous amounts of data. To stay afloat in this expanding sea of data, companies must focus some of their budgets on BI tools that enable them to efficiently extract meaningful information from their test data. Having access to timely and accurate information is an important resource for a company in part because it expedites decision making. When a business intelligence system is well-designed and properly integrated into a company's decision-making process, BI improves overall company performance.
Don Holley
Marketing Manager
VI Technology
|
|
|
|
Read about the latest information for integrating automated test systems throughout the enterprise. |
|
|
|
 |
Download PDF |
|
|
