Enabling a Wireless Service Provider Multi-Vendor Test Lab

Customer Overview. A major wireless service provider’s test lab needed to accommodate a multi-vendor environment, with separate user rooms and simultaneous users, with assurance of privacy and centralized scheduling. As part of the planning for the new lab architecture, numerous existing inefficiencies needed to be addressed as well. Lab resource scheduling was manual, performed by single dedicated resource. Reservations were not locked, and the schedule was not visible outside the host team.

The Challenge. Tracking usage and scheduling of all resources remained manual and inefficient, capital investment of more than 600 test devices and over 50 remote and local testers, supporting at least seven vendors, were underutilized. Multi-vendor teams with competing interests needed unique privacy of devices and testing process, along with transparent scheduling, and centralized permissions, with effective resource optimization. Communications inefficiencies with knowledge sharing and work transfer between internal and external test teams impacted productivity, requiring reliable orchestration of testers and resource utilization.