Why Is Your Operational Procedure in a Different System Than Your Test Data?
Nominal
Procedures are the life force of high consequence operations. Rigorous engineering judgement and actions often comes down to engineers themselves leaving a trail of sequenced actions, informed by data and well defined constraints.
Unfortunately, most teams run operational procedures in one system and analyze the data in another. Whether you're running a live hardware in the loop simulation, firing a spacecraft thruster in a vacuum chamber, or completing a factory acceptance test at end of manufacturing line, these procedures often live on paper, in Confluence, in a Google Doc, in an internal built tool, or, worst case, in the head of the soon-to-retire engineer who has run the test sequence forty times.
Purpose built procedure or Jira wrapper tools can be very good at authoring, versioning, redlining, and sign-off, but they lack system of record, miltary-grade data infrastructure to capture, manage, and collaboratively analyze the operations data produced. Instead they tell an operator what to check for; we believe running procedures should optimize engineering attention and often be able to just check it automatically.
What Changes When the Procedure Can See the Data
Nominal procedures puts test execution, live telemetry monitoring, and collaborative analysis in the same system.
Live data advances the test. Nominal makes it dead simple to define a condition, such as one channel below a value, held for a duration, and progress gates on tracking this user defined state. A step clears when the parameters are met.
Command the hardware. Open a valve, trigger ignition, set the chamber to 200°C. A step can automatically send a command out to your test or operations infrastructure, then it waits for a success response before advancing. The procedure talks and listens, with associated live monitoring and trending on the console screens of operators.
Annotate the data as it runs. Every completed step drops a timestamped event on the captured data, as well as recording channel values at the moment a step cleared. When the test ends, engineering teams have one shared transcript to explain what happened, when, who ran it, and what was the state at every step.
Analyze the data across every test. Nominal also institutes best practices like cross comparing the results of a procedure execution from test to test. This allows operators, and geographically distributed engineering teams, to understand when data is in family and spot trends faster. Adding trending to post test / post op reporting practices results in operators sharing more knowledge and context with one another by design. This helps everyone on the team have more confidence in systems, often driving faster turnaround times between operations.
Want to Win? Optimize Engineering Attention!
Machines of tomorrow are not going to be built like the past. Hardware teams winning today focus on collaboration and optimizing their most valuable asset: the attention of their highly skilled engineers and operators.
No longer should values be fat fingered between tools by hand.
No longer should steps be marked complete without the data record of why.
No longer should reconstructing what happened result in a three week forensics project.
With Nominal, the as-run record is a byproduct of running daily operations. The moment the run ends, the whole team has a shared, context-rich workspace to dive straight into critical analysis and reporting, together.
The Bigger Picture
Hardware programs are paced by how fast you can learn from a test, and closing the gap between execution and analysis compresses both execution time and time to decision. The next test, the next milestone, and the next delivery all land earlier when operators deeply understand their systems in real time.
Procedures are the sequence and the safeguards of a test campaign. We’re building modular procedures engineering teams can rapidly spin up once, then reuse and improve over time.
Book a demo (opens in new tab) to learn more about Nominal and how our software platform can connect your procedures and real time hardware data analysis.