I love making reports. Said NO ENGINEER. EVER.
Every engineer procrastinates preparing a test report as the efforts are high and it consumes lot of his engineering hours. Having said that, test reports remain critical to any business environment as it serves the purpose of providing information for decision making and follow up actions. It is considered an official document, after thorough investigation or consideration by an appointed person or more relevant, group of people.
In this blog, we talk about the test engineers pain points in preparing test reports and ascertain an idea of holistic solution to help engineers overcome this hurdle, and become more effective engineering workforce
We all can agree that engineers are intellectuals and have been associated with easing way of living for the society with innovative products over the decades. More importantly, there is a continuous quest for improving the existing value creation of current products.
The test engineers in the Automotive domain are the majority of workforce. Any effort to boost their productivity, would enable them to have more time for innovation. When it comes to preparing report, instead of working on core engineering tasks, engineer has to stress about search, compile and preparation of data / information. So, in these times, even though reports are inevitable by any business, there has to be a simpler way for engineers to prepare report.
We highlight 4 specific areas that every engineer should be entitled to make their life easier and their engineering targets are achieved quicker, without comprising the quality of work.
1. Collaboration portal
Test reports are output to collective efforts put by a team in planning, preparing, executing & inferencing a test. While conducting a test, an information trail is setup, and this demands for a collaboration portal. This portal would benefit engineer & OEMs in accomplishing enhanced test case (& project management) where the test case is administered with respect to test unit, test lab & human resources. The engineer does not waste time in retrieving information or follow ups. From day one of portal implementation, engineer would find the workflows streamlined and sense the improvement in communication & team engagements. The information & data sharing happens in an organized manner and no more it is scattered or person dependent. This information would be accessible all the time, independent of engineer’s location.
2. Seamless connectivity – plug in the information gap
Engineer works in an heterogenous environment, where they are surrounded by many test sources, measurement systems, data formats, tools & software. These systems are mostly from various suppliers, with each specializing in their sphere of work. However, the challenge that engineer faces is of accessing the unified information pertaining to planning, execution and reporting procedure. The scattered information, which has structured & unstructured data, makes it difficult for the engineer to speed up test & its reporting. The need of hour for an engineer is an engineering portal that interfaces with other information sources and offers complete traceability by touching all the bases of prototype/product test lifecycle.
3. Instant transparency
The immediate transparency of relevant information ensures that test engineers can identify targeted improvement opportunities. An unbiased view of productivity factors enables fact-based and conflict-free discussions about what action needs to be taken next. In this way, the person responsible for the test field can take the lead and drive these important discussions forward.
The standardization of the technology and content of the reporting systems allows for a reduction of administrative effort. At the same time, it participates in the continuous improvement of the reporting system. Special requirements can be taken into consideration by the test group and, pending feasibility, implemented quickly.
4. Automate your reporting
Everybody would agree to the fact that engineers waste way too much time in preparing reports. Through the above three initiatives, engineer is able to search, compile and reuse the information & data. However, if all the information & data is available in the portal, then why shouldn’t the report making process also be automated? It reduces the human error & completes the information loop. Moreover, as the information & data in the system is standardized, organized & structurally stored, the system becomes machine-readable.
With every OEM investing on digital transformation, and trying to implement Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, this system will be future ready to those.
The above initiatives would assist the engineers in saving their efforts on non-core tasks and accomplish effectiveness in their engineering ecosystem.
As the end consequence of inefficiency at work, your engineering team fails to deliver quality end products and satisfy clients, resulting in your company or start-up never reaching the success it could. With tech becoming such an integral part of automotive and the stakes so high, it is important that the OEMs leave no stones unturned to make sure these engineering initiatives are adopted and creates an environment that enables engineers to innovate.
Your engineer & TITAN would be the best match!!
TITAN is an end-to-end test lifecycle solution. It supports engineering group to efficiently and effectively manage all aspects of test lifecycle. TITAN deliver critical insights to innovate test life cycle, increase testing productivity and efficiency, enhance team collaboration and engineering flexibility, maintain utmost quality and traceability, and ultimately lower cost & time of product validation.
TITAN helps test field managers to identify productivity opportunities. The transparency of the test field is simplified and forms the basis for the optimization of operating times. It can handle system engineering for any kind of vehicle (for any level of automation in vehicle), and is ready to handle the complex data landscape.
TITAN reporting portal automates the report preparation for the engineer. An engineer can easily select the choice of report, he/she wants to create at a click of button using the portal. As all the test lifecycle information is available in one portal, engineer can easily populate the parts of reports by selecting information like test plan details, test unit details, test data, part images (even, resizing), observations, incidents & concerns.
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