Peak Resource Planner (now a part of Peak Test Management Suite) ensures conflict free planning of tests at TRW OSS

The automotive supplier TRW currently has a staff of over 60,000 employees, producing modern vehicle safety systems at 185 locations across the world. Since the company places great emphasis on quality and reliability, the development of these safety systems was backed up by a large number of experiments and tests. For this purpose, the test engineers use various test bays in which all the necessary test resources, such as dummies, measuring equipment, cameras, test specimens and test personnel, need to be available for the planned test dates. The planning tools that were being used so far met their limits.

Against this backdrop, the airbag and crash laboratory from TRW OSS at the Alfdorf location decided to count on the “Peak Resource Planner”. The objective was to obtain a better overview of the availability of test resources and to avoid multiple assignments.

Thanks to the “Peak Resource Planner”, the testing managers can now accurately determine what test resources they require for the implementation of specific tests. As soon as a test date is scheduled, the system marks all test resources involved in the test as occupied. Separate availability calendars are maintained for the different types of test resources. This way, all involved people have already in the planning phase a good overview of whether the required test resources are available.

In addition, the “Peak Resource Planner” actively points out any possible conflicts during sheduling the allocation of test resources. Thanks to a “skill matrix”, for example, all employee qualifications required for the operation of certain test facilities are compared with the qualification profiles of the employees designated for this purpose.

The implementation of the access rights and the authentication of the users is managed with a central directory service of the company. Accordingly, the “Peak Resource Planner” was extended specifically for TRW by adding an LDAP interface.

Thanks to its open and component-based architecture, it was possible to integrate the “Peak Resource Planner” into the existing TRW IT infrastructure in a short time and with little effort. In future, the solution can also be adapted quickly and flexibly by simple customizing to different technical assignments and requirements. The follow-up costs for using the Peak Resource Planner are thus reduced to a minimum.

Not least because of this, the next project steps are already being planned: Connecting the “Peak Resource Planner” to the central SAP system and the using the solution at other international locations of the company. Due to its multi-language capabilities (German, English, Chinese), the “Peak Resource Planner” is even now optimally equipped for international deployment within the corporation.