Take a moment to resurface your suppressed memories as a blundering teenager transitioning into adulthood. It wasn’t always easy to grow into the self-assured and competent adults we are today. Maybe it’s better to keep memories of our teenage years stored away, but we all go through growing pains, right? Organizations are no different and experience discomforts and anxieties as business needs evolve, particularly after mergers and acquisitions.
Keeping up with the pace of innovation and global market competition is a challenging task for companies, and those that are also facing organizational change have even more to overcome. As companies rapidly grow and the push to get complex products to market faster intensifies, validation teams are often at the center of the conflict. Teams must navigate how to deal with a new level of bring-up, debug, and characterization that comes with increased test coverage and aggressive schedules.
NI recently had the opportunity to support a semiconductor company that was experiencing quite a few growing pains. Their experience may feel too familiar: The company structure was majorly shifting, and product designs were also getting more complex, but validation windows were shortening. Multiple validation teams were using different processes, hardware, and software, resulting in a lack of knowledge sharing and IP reuse.
Instead of being overwhelmed by fragmentation and change, one senior validation manager was inspired to improve inefficiencies to help redefine the company’s competitive edge. He knew that even small inefficiencies have big impacts on whether a company captures market share. We witnessed firsthand how this team’s dedication to reprioritizing time and resources in the right areas accelerated development cycles and improved product quality.
While mergers and acquisitions often set the tone for an organization’s future, it’s often better to address what’s in front of you before looking to what’s next. Getting people to embrace change can be difficult—and sometimes, even emotional—which is why implementing change incrementally is often more advantageous when transforming your validation lab. After a company reorganization, there might be an urge to get everyone on the same page by starting from scratch, but this company’s manager found success by surveying existing assets and then maximizing commonality. The manager asked his teammates which programs and instruments they were using currently, which helped him build a new validation strategy with the least disruptive technology. He considered: “Given what my company is using now, what will be the easiest to use going forward to build a unified framework?”
They decided to develop a standard framework that would eliminate the need to code and lead to significant efficiency increases. Their internal assessment showed that teams were using different hardware, both PXI and other types of instruments. The decision to standardize on PXI was clear since the value was well understood. PXI uses less space, provides increased channel density, and offers a wide product portfolio to fit most of their needs. As far as software was concerned, they agreed to standardize on the two most popular programming languages: both Python and G through LabVIEW. This step is where NI went above and beyond as a partner. NI understood the value of standardizing software and supported their vision, working together to develop a tailored solution. This solution outlined the architecture for the necessary validation framework. It also helped them seamlessly use LabVIEW and Python in one validation environment. With PXI as the backbone of instrumentation and software as the glue, this company’s teams saw higher accuracy, higher speeds, and higher productivity in the development cycle.
Working toward standardization was also key to helping teams achieve similar goals quickly as opposed to working in silos. Standardizing software and creating open standards where the same instrumentation and measurement IP were used at each site set the team up for success, allowing them to characterize devices more quickly, expand measurement coverage, and utilize measurement data more effectively.
This manager realized he needed buy-in from other teammates and stakeholders to change processes in the organization on a bigger scale—and he had to get creative to convince others. Luckily, these pilot programs of software deployments produced tangible results and data that could be easily communicated and demonstrated to others. This manager’s analysis on efficiency added credibility to why small changes and investment in software, hardware, and services really do improve productivity, streamline lab workflows, and accelerate time to market. With trust from his teammates, fostering a more collaborative environment with knowledge sharing practices was much more feasible even as the company grew.
Learn more about what your lab modernization journey can look like and how NI can help in our latest ebooks.
