 Standardizing all test stations development on Proligent
"Proligent is a key part of our strategy to implement test management best practices, establishing critical links to the rest of the production flow. The Proligent solution allows us to significantly lower the cost of developing test software in order to automate defect detection and the characterization of units in production. Without adding overhead to test development, Proligent allows us to supervise, control and trace our products anywhere our test stations are located."
 Denis Gagnon, Manager, Test Engineering, Harris MCD
Overview
Harris standardizes new test stations development on Proligent to reduce development and maintenance costs while improving the reliability and traceability of its test systems.
The context
Harris is an international communications and information technology company serving markets for government communications, RF communications, broadcast communications, and microwave communications.
Harris targeted to initiate the production of highly-complex microwave digital radios, which relied on ten different types of test stations to produce a unit in manufacturing. Harris required a flexible, reliable, and traceable quality testing setup to centrally manage the product flow, test criteria and results, version and revision specific test procedures, and several other operational details, all for a set of distributed product lines located at different production sites, including possible roll-outs to asian contract manufacturer sites.
A standardized test platform for better and less expensive test systems
The Proligent test platform was used along with NI TestStand to develop all test stations. Test cases are implemented as Proligent plug-in, also called “Automation Components”. Those components were custom developed in LabVIEW.
Proligent and TestStand provided user-friendly interfaces to define and manage tests sequences and parameters, users, products definition and production processes.
Proligent centralized test results data collection, and also brought a traceable and auditable test process that featured strong failure and repair capabilities. While providing a complete access to test floor workflow and test data and results, Proligent provided a series of built-in reports for WIP, yield analysis and SPC capabilities at a very low cost.
Eight different type of test stations were created for the newest generation of microwave digital radios, and each station’s throughput exceeded by far the performance of the previous generation of test stations, in large part due to the highly-optimized data access of Proligent.
Conclusion
Proligent software allowed Harris to build eight different test systems based on a common and standardized software platform. The development cycle of test systems was more efficient then ever and enabled Harris to experience a significant payback while reducing the risk of delaying production due to test engineering efforts. Harris is now considering retrofitting all its existing test systems on Proligent to reduce maintenance costs and better manage the collaboration between remote production facilities.
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