A Fortune 150 Aerospace Manufacturer Quickly Saves Millions with Sente Test Resource Management™

The Challenge
1,600 engineers. 140 different projects. All on tight schedules.

And always somebody who didn't have the test equipment they needed, when they needed it.

What to do? For many individual engineers, the answer was to stockpile any equipment they could get their hands on—"just in case." But hoarding only created more problems:

• Time wasted searching for equipment
• Unnecessary equipment purchases
• An abundance of obsolete equipment
• All instead of designing new products ... possibly the highest cost of all in such a competitive environment.

Equipment sat idle in nooks and cabinets across the company, pushing utilization down to 15% and costing the company as much as $10M per year in excess operating costs.

At a time of strained budgets, the situation had become urgent.

The Solution
The only way to raise that utilization rate and cut those related costs: Start getting engineers the equipment they needed on time by enabling them to share effortlessly. It took the holistic approach of a Test Resource Management™ solution from Sente, including:

• A refined set of practices for coordinating equipment between projects and programs.
• Sophisticated software that enabled the process workflows and put important decision making data at users' fingertips.
• Accountability practices to track where process breakdowns occur and provide closed-loop feedback to resolve those issues—thus injecting trust into the new processes. So engineers know they'll get what they need when they need it, and cooperate more fully as a result.
• Real-time metrics that drive incentives at all levels of the organization to eliminate waste.

Implementation was quick, driving rapid results while allowing engineers to provide feedback and make sure the solution fit their needs.

The Results
By getting engineers the equipment they need when they need it, the customer quickly reduced engineers' "just in case" stockpiling of equipment, freeing up equipment capacity companywide.

Within three months, the customer had …

• Increased data accuracy to over 95%.
• Decreased engineers' wait time for equipment requests from 16 weeks to less than 1 day.
• Reduced past-due calibrations from 10.5% to less than 0.2%.

Within one year, the customer had …

• Cut its capital budget for test equipment by 50%.
• Used that savings to reinvest into business growth that's now producing over 100 times that first—year savings in additional revenue.

Today, the company has …

• Boosted utilization from 15% to 65%—a 4x increase.
• Cut test equipment assets in half—while doubling its business.

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