As both a supplier and consumer of automation and communication technologies, National Instruments has developed a strategy to use its own products to make products. Called Ultimate II, this internal tool helps the company bridge the gap between design and manufacturing and bring products to market more quickly by speeding the product life cycle.
In a process Truchard calls, “Eating your own dog food,” Ultimate II combines NI’s PC-based instrumentation, TestStand tools and LabView software in a development, management and test execution engine. It uses commercial computing and communications technologies, such as extensible markup language (XML) and distributed input/output devices, to automate everything from design validation through test and manufacturing.
“One of the trends we see in manufacturing is a change in the inspection procedures. In the past, inspectors at the end of the production line would be putting good product in one bin and bad product in another,” says Truchard. “With time, we learned to move the inspectors up the production line to become operators. As operators, if there was a bad part, they could immediately course correct and quit making bad parts. We can do the same thing with automation where the same controllers can be used to both control the process and perform the testing. As we make the components, we can be testing them.”
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