Why should I automate my production testing?

Once your product is in Production, you might be looking for ways to reduce costs, improve quality and productivity. One way to achieve this with higher run products is through automated production test.

When your company is making 10-20 items per day it seems reasonable to have technicians ‘run-up’ the product once its assembled, perhaps do a ‘burn-in’ (power on) test for 24hrs then ‘final test’ the product before packing and dispatch. As the orders grow in volume you begin to add more resource to all parts of the process. The number of technicians and available ‘burn-in’ space become bottlenecks in the process flow.

In any process there will always be a bottleneck (or constraint). These are relatively easy to spot on the production floor as they are usually the point in the process with the most work in progress piled up before them! One of the keys to a smoothly running process is to match the production batch sizes to the maximum possible output from the constraint and to link all the processes to the constraint. Another key is to make sure that the input going into the constraint (e.g. ‘burn-in’) process is 100% known good product.

So, your orders have increased and you now have a contingent of technicians performing ‘run-up’ and ‘final test’ of the products. How can automating some or all of the production test process help? To start with let’s look at quality. An automated test system based around a PC and a series of instruments doesn’t get headaches or tired, have hangovers or bad days. So the consistency of an automated solution improves your quality.

What about productivity? Typically a fully automated production test system will test a product faster than the manual method as some items may be done simultaneously.

How will it reduce costs? Think of Production Test as a series of gates that the product has to get through before being released to the customer. It’s best to keep the assembly stages small with a test at the end of each to ensure the maximum possible errors are picked up as early on in the process as possible. A product fault at final test costs a lot more to fix (and in some cases causes more bangs and smoke!) than identifying a board assembly error immediately after the component loading stage. Also fully automated systems usually require an operator rather than a skilled technician to operate them.

Automated testing has some significant benefits as the run rates increase and you start having a harder look at what you’re doing and why.

Peter Brown
Managing Director
Nightside Test Design Ltd.
www.nightside.co.nz