Average Utilization Before Sente: The "Before Sente" bar represents the aggregated average asset utilization of Sente's installed customer base prior to installing a Sente Test Resource Management™ (TRM) solution.

Average Utilization, Previous Quarter: The latest quarter bar represents the aggregated average utilization achieved by Sente customers that have been using a TRM solution for at least one year.

Current Utilization Performance:
More than 4X improvement

Utilization: A Critical Performance Metric
In high-tech industries, where testing is a mission-critical function, test equipment asset utilization is a critical measure of efficiency and productivity. In the typical high-tech product company, only 5% to 20% of test equipment inventories are in use at any one time. Meaning that at any given time, as much as 95% of a company's test equipment assets are sitting idle.

This fact—combined with the size of the installed base of test equipment in larger organizations—provides grounding for our claim that capital spend and associated costs can be reduced 50% to 75% by improving utilization.

Optimizing utilization is key to effectively managing test equipment assets. Higher test equipment utilization levels allow companies to unleash existing, pent-up investment capital capacity. Management then 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.

The Utilization Trap – Avoid Mistaking "Deployed" for "Utilized"
Any discussion of the importance of utilization is not complete without drawing a distinction between "utilization" and "deployment." In far too many organizations that have implemented test equipment asset management initiatives—including some that have been publicly recognized for achieving "standard-setting" asset utilization levels—a piece of equipment is counted as "utilized" when it is deployed out of an equipment pool. By this definition, a piece of equipment stationed at a test bench is considered utilized. After all, the sign-out sheet, local spreadsheet or even more ominously, the report from the central asset database, says it is.

A short tour through your test labs will quickly show you that this is a false notion. It's common for over 90% of assets to be deployed from cribs into labs. It's equally common for management in these companies to assume that utilization is therefore 90%. In companies we've benchmarked, however, common approaches to driving productivity—including all asset management initiatives we're aware of-have produced about 15% utilization on average. That's far less than the 90% result you see when counting every piece of deployed equipment as "utilized."