ATE sustainment in a PBL environment: Effective methods for long term supportability of modern cots based ATE

Modern General Purpose Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) systems are expected to provide a wide variety of functionality to meet the performance needs of both legacy as well as new Unit Under Test (UUT) Test Program Set (TPS) routines. With technologies associated with ATE systems being updated and modernized to keep pace with industry developments and UUT complexity, the sustainment of these systems has to keep pace in order to ensure the large investments in the ATE itself are not wasted by system downtime. What causes downtime and ultimately affects the ATE´s operational availability is not as simple to predict as it once was and yesterday´s support strategies won´t meet the needs of today´s, and for that matter, the future complexities of ATE products. This paper will discuss individual sustainment tasks, when used effectively and integrated together, can provide a complete logistics supply chain solution that ensures optimum ATE uptime and return on your ATE investment.