Pat Hindle, MWJ Editor
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Pat Hindle is responsible for editorial content, article review and special industry reporting for Microwave Journal magazine and its web site in addition to social media and special digital projects. Prior to joining the Journal, Mr. Hindle held various technical and marketing positions throughout New England, including Marketing Communications Manager at M/A-COM (Tyco Electronics), Product/QA Manager at Alpha Industries (Skyworks), Program Manager at Raytheon and Project Manager/Quality Engineer at MIT. Mr. Hindle graduated from Northeastern University - Graduate School of Business Administration and holds a BS degree from Cornell University in Materials Science Engineering.

Cloud Service Enables Large Savings in Test Asset Utilization

July 10, 2018

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I recently covered how cloud services are helping accelerate design services with virtual CAE, and now we have seen an announcement from GradientOne about accelerating hardware utilization and providing insights into test data using their cloud platform. Their asset utilization service augments GradientOne's cloud application suite that includes test data acquisition and archiving, online collaboration, data analytics and reporting tools. Together these deliver an integrated end to end solution as an alternative to homegrown ones that are difficult to maintain.

GradientOne’s asset utilization suite provides automated test asset discovery, utilization reporting, scheduling and calibration tracking. These features help simplify the day to day tasks associated with efficiently managing test labs. For Granite River Labs mentioned in the release, utilization trackers were downloaded, installed, and deployed in less than 10 minutes for each test system. Rapid deployment coupled with real time visibility yielded quick time to value for Granite River Labs’ global footprint according to the release.

GradiantOne

In a case study from GradientOne, Granite River Labs (GRL) realized a significant financial impact in excess of $1 million in savings. This was broken down in three primary areas: 1) $750k of expensive assets previously underutilized were redeployed to more productive labs; 2) 50% increase in utilization of existing assets based off visibility into hourly usage trends and optimizing staffing balance, resulting in a $240k impact; and 3) $50k in savings from manual attempts to use spreadsheets and other tracking tools to report on asset usage and tracking of calibration information.

GRL is a leader in engineering services and test solutions for connectivity. With 8 test labs around the world, GRL maintains a multi-million dollar investment in test infrastructure, ranging from oscilloscopes, to chambers, to network analyzers, to BERTs, and more so this effort seems well worth it. GradientOne offers a free trial so you can download it and try it out.