At Hectronic we have a tradition of develop our production test systems in-house. Over the years this has shown to give us several huge advantages, the main advantage being that knowledge transferred between testing and development becomes very efficient. Apart from that its also cost efficient and the system maintenance is easier. To have the production test system development in-house means that no external consultants are needed when service I required. And this is extremely important when servicing a system that is located in another part of the world.
Another great advantage in having the exact same graphical interface to test different products. The software usage is the same between all products, and therefore the operators only need training in how to connect a new product to the test system. This would probably not have been possible to achieve for 15 years using externally sourced software.
Our engineers at Hectronic gathers all the output data from all production test systems in servers at our Uppsala office. From the resulting databased we can obtain all sorts of quality performance data.
Summing up all the above advantages with developing production test systems in-house, we decided to initiate a project to update our test system code. In fact, it can be considered a re-start almost from scratch. While our old test system had been a loyal companion since 2005 and been trough a lot of maintenance and modifications, it is time to develop a new system that is designed in a modular way with an updated user interface. The goal has been to develop a production test system that has a much more modular design while keeping the same functionality as the old production test system.
Now, we will be able to work even more efficient while our customers get all the advantages from using an in-house developed production test system. Win-win, as you say.