Many organizations pursue digital transformation to boost efficiency and mission readiness, yet only three percent succeed. NI can help your organization leverage test and test data for a higher chance of success.
Often, product testing can be viewed as a necessary evil, essential for quality and performance yet often blamed for cost and schedule overruns. This low regard for testing leads to its exclusion from digital transformation initiatives, contributing to the low success rate of about three percent. A poor opinion of product testing and the lack of a holistic approach, including test and measurement data, may explain these struggles.
Test data plays a vital role in supporting engineering and a business’s efforts to evolve digitally. It streamlines processes and empowers teams to innovate faster and more productively. That is why it’s so important for those who oversee design, production, MRO, and other parts of a business to understand the value of test data across the entire enterprise.
Automated test and measurement systems that are connected and tightly integrated with instrumentation and test data can improve efficiency and quality across the product lifecycle in several ways. For example, automated validation and characterization can interface seamlessly with design and simulation tools so test program sets can be developed earlier. Automated production test systems that are linked to a manufacturing execution system (MES) can ensure that test assets are allocated and managed efficiently. Plus, linked systems help guarantee that test execution is optimized as manufacturing conditions change. Automated intermediate- and operational-level systems used for field maintenance and testing can share usage, diagnostic, and repair data automatically to inform ongoing product development and refinement.
Many organizations that hope to integrate test data into their digital transformation initiatives face several challenges. For one, multiple factors—including government regulations, incompatible data formats, and/or communication protocols used by legacy test equipment and software—hinder their ability to combine disparate data sets. Second, test data is often stored without metadata that describes the operating context of the test, which process leaders rely on to improve the usefulness of the test data. Finally, organizations must combine real-time data with historical data and make all of it readily available so process leaders and operators can use it on demand.
Fortunately, there are solutions on the market today to address the challenges impeding a business’s digital transformation. IT units and operations teams can employ these solutions concurrently and strategically, helping their businesses move toward this ultimate goal.
Using the NI ecosystem of PXI and NI software, Thales developed an automated, standardized test strategy that reduces test time while increasing quality. Gain insights into their approach to digital transformation, data, and personnel, along with their strategies to maximize business impact.
NI SystemLink software empowers aerospace and defense organizations by streamlining test and measurement workflows. By automating data management and standardizing processes, SystemLink enhances test efficiency, reduces costs, and accelerates insights, driving innovation and operational excellence.
