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Angotti Product Deveopment Newsletter

Volume 8, No. 4 (Click Here for pdf Version)

"Helping You Accelerate Your High-Tech Development Projects"

Welcome to the ANGOTTI PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT e-mail newsletter!

The goal of this  newsletter is to help you accelerate your development projects by sharing many of the tips, techniques, and strategies we've honed during three decades of providing high-tech consulting services.

Using Decision Analysis Tools in Selecting Alternate Engineering Design Projects

By Carl Angotti, Angotti Product Development, https://www.angotti.com

Introduction

This article is intended to help Engineering Managers make better decisions regarding how to proceed on the projects they have at hand, whether they are for a development or a production tester or some other project to be undertaken. The process can be generalized to assist in making any general business management decision.

What is a Decision Analysis?

No process can make a business decision for a manager, but there are several ways to assist a manager in making better decisions. Utilizing a formal process is a significant improvement over the decision by the "seat of your pants." These tools assist in making a much better and reasoned decision. In the end, though, the manager is often faced with deciding with insufficient information to make a final decision. These tools, as a class, are known as "Decision Analysis Tools." They assist in making a decision when many of the needed facts are uncertain. 

There are many good places to get a more in-depth understanding of such tools. Several of these have been collected on my website at https://www.angotti.com/docs/analyisistools.pdf  . So, if you are curious about the background of this article, check out a few of these.
The general concepts of making uncertain decisions are based upon several items, the factor under consideration, the relative significance, and the relative impact on the outcome of the decision. On a general level, if one assigns say one to five weights for importance and impact of a factor, then the score of a particular factor is computed as:

(relative significance of a factor) times (impact of a factor) = total score for a factor

Each of these scores can be added to a total. Then, these can be summed to yield a total score for a particular decision.

Now alternate decisions can be compared with each other, and a selection can be made among them. These scores are not just immediately acted upon, just because of the numbers. Instead, after this, the decision-maker looks at the results and judges whether the outcome ranking makes much sense. Often the outcomes are pretty close together, so only slight changes in the analyses can change a ranking. Perhaps the earlier factor analyses need to be reviewed; then, the weights might be changed to create a new analysis. This review points out where the critical factors lie, and that assists strongly in the final decision.

What are Outcome Factors in Making a Reasoned Judgement?

These weightings represent the factors, or short descriptions, of what might be considered in making a decision. These depend upon what is known by the decision-makers and what they have on hand or might be easily obtained via research or internal data gathering. As an example, it might be the "total project cost" with 5 = very high relative cost and one = a very, very low relative cost. 3 might be a modest cost. Of course, these are all judgments in themselves, but the cost consideration helps decide this particular factor's value.

The Criticality Factor Explained

These weighting factors represent a judgment based upon past knowledge of how critical a factor is in making the decision. Again, as an example, if budgets are very tight, this might be assigned a value of 5, for very important, or a 0 for not crucial if cost isn't as critical a factor as other factors might be.

The Impact of a Factor Explained

Creating and Using a Simple Analysis Tool

An illustration of how such an analysis might work is presented here. The decision involves choosing a Production Test design. The choices are:

1) A more inexpensive and easier to develop manual one
2) A mid-cost semi-automatic one
3) A higher cost and more challenging to develop fully automatic tester

This particular company is a mid-sized one with a modest budget. The devices to be tested cost about $100 each to fabricate and assemble. The volume produced is estimated at 100 per month. The life of this product is expected to be five years into the future. For this situation, the life cycle value of the tester is $100 per unit X 100 Units per month X 60 months, or $600,000. In this situation, if product tester development costs are planned to not add significantly to the unit production cost, these might amount to adding 5% to the final tested cost allowing $30,000 for such a development. 

Example of the Factors that Make up the Decision

Semi-Auto Testing the UUT

The unit under test sequence using a Universal Basic test code executable is described here. Testing is accomplished utilizing a unique PC test control program. The test process is described in this section.
When the program starts, the program opens a window on the PCB. The program requests the name of the Operator and the UUT serial number on the PC screen.

After this, UUT testing proceeds by opening an input text file. Test instructions are presented to the Operator, and the results appear on the PC monitor. They are presented with the pass/fail criteria. The Operator then checks the results on the two DVMs and responds to the test pass/fail status or the PC screen. This response is then recorded on an output test archive file. After this, the subsequent instructions are presented, and the process continues until all of the tests are completed.

A snippet of the output file follows a snippet of the input test code for the UUT.

Input Test Code Snippet

Summary of this Article

This article illustrates how to use a simple  methodology to evaluate the factors that make a  decision between various alternatives

To learn more about the Custom Tester development provided by Angotti Product Development, check out our webpage at https://www.angotti.com/Test%20Engineering%20Menu.html or send an email to carl@angotti.com or phone 408-462-2189.

FOR FUTURE NEWSLETTERS

Future newsletters will discuss in more detail each of the testers described in this newsletter. Get on our mailing list by sending an email to mailto:carl@angotti.com and requesting to be included. You can learn much more about the test engineering services we provide by going to the Angotti Product Development Test Website.

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MORE FREE MATERIAL ON PROJECT MANAGEMENT

 For more FREE Project Management tips, techniques and strategies, and to learn more about the services available to my clients, be sure to visit the ANGOTTI PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT website at www.angotti.com.

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Project Management, Systems and Circuit Design Services for Electronic Product Development