Page 55 - Building A Succesful Board-Test Strategy
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What Is a Test Strategy? 41
Training-cost impact of
strategy decisions
Existing equipment
New equipment,
same vendors
New vendors
New test strategy
New facility
Figure 1-1 2 Training costs are inversely related to everyone’s familiarity with various
test-strategy components.
easy to manufacture and test will require less ramp-up time and less attention from
management people, resulting in lower startup costs.
Initiating manufacturing incurs costs for parts, labor, holding work-in-
process inventory, and people or equipment to move components, boards, and
systems from station to station through the process. Test costs include costs for
testing components at the vendor, at incoming inspection, or by a third party, as
well as costs for board test and system test. Burn-in and ESS introduce their own
costs, influencing cost distributions at board and system levels.
One major cost component when introducing a new test strategy is training.
Operators need to know how to run the equipment, programmers must understand
the nuances and peculiarities that characterize any tester, and managers must
become familiar with the anticipated personality of the selected test operation as
well as the nature and value of resultant data. Training costs are inversely related
to everyone’s familiarity with various test-strategy components. Relying on exist-
ing equipment incurs the lowest training costs, establishing a new test facility, the
highest, as Figure 1-12 shows.
Another factor that can significantly increase training costs is personnel
turnover. High turnover demands extra effort to train new people as they come on
board. Training new people takes longer than training current people, even on an
entirely new project or test strategy, because current employees are already famil-
iar with the management personnel, management style, and other environmental
aspects of the corporate personality.
Involving manufacturing people in test-strategy decision-making and then
training them adequately to implement the agreed-on approaches make them more
