The Business Case for TRM

The business case for Test Resource Management™ (TRM) centers on the untapped potential of a company's test environment to help increase engineering productivity while focusing human and equipment capital on more strategic activities.

Average utilization across engineering and operations is below 20%. Low utilization is merely a symptom of poor coordination of test activities that results not only in wasted equipment cost, but unproductive time for engineers and schedule delays for programs. As a result, a lot of people and money remain tied up in inefficient processes instead of being reallocated and focused on critical growth projects.

By increasing utilization, many companies can achieve:

• Capital budget reductions of 50% to 75%
• Maintenance and support cost reductions approaching 50%
• Reduction in unproductive user time of 75% to 90%
• Test cycle time reductions of 20%

In other words, improving test equipment utilization allows companies to unleash existing, pent-up, full-invested capital capacity to other more strategic purposes.

Through the higher utilization that a TRM solution from Sente is proven to deliver, management has the flexibility to shift already-planned invesTMents of capital to new areas, or hold on to newly released capital capacity for future programs while dropping the savings directly to the bottom line as a cost reduction.

For example, in one customer's asset base, strategic leveraging of underutilized infrastructure along with installation of TRM processes enabled a 50% reduction while the capital dollars freed were used strategically for growth. Today, this company supports a business twice the size on half the assets: a quadrupling of their real utilization.

To get a glimpse of the potential financial benefits of a TRM solution for your company, use Sente's free online assessment tools.