Tailoring ESS strategies for effectiveness and efficiency

The need to reduce production costs through process streamlining is paramount in today's highly competitive environment. For ESS, this means that it must be justified in terms of the overall value it provides to the customer. Therefore, this paper addresses the problem of designing an ESS test strategy that is effective, yet makes efficient uses of test resources. The experiences described in this paper show that it is possible to streamline an ESS process, and still preserve its effectiveness. In this case study, the resulting strategy incorporated a two-level ESS program. It integrates the ESS testing of spare modules with the ESS testing of deliverable LRUs (line replaceable units). The new strategy also accounts for the need to tailor environmental stress and functional testing to the operational characteristics of the equipment. The result of these changes is a streamlined protocol that shortened ESS in process time, and reduced the demand on costly test resources.