PLA at Lucent

Telecoms giant using product lifecycle automation to accelerate development-to-market process

Mountain View, CA  October 17, 2002  Lucent Technologies is set to deploy a product lifecycle automation solution from provider MS2 in bid to cut its time to market and improve collaboration within the company and with its supply chain partners.

Lucent began using MS2's Accelerate software in an initial project early last year. In the second phase of implementation, which began in the summer of 2001, the telecoms giant deployed the solution in its division responsible for optical networking product development, in the company's supply chain network organization, Lucent Worldwide Services, and in the sales and marketing organizations supporting the optical division.

During the initial phase, Lucent reported that Accelerate helped the company reduce the time it takes to bring new products to market while improving collaboration within the organization and with its suppliers working on product development. In July of 2002, Lucent made the decision to deploy the solution for all product development.

Today Lucent is rolling out Accelerate across its remaining product divisions, as well as the functional organizations such as Lucent's Supply Chain Networks and Lucent Worldwide Services and external partners supporting Lucent's product groups.

"As part of our efforts to improve processes and systems, we developed a standard process management architecture (PMA) for evaluating and comparing product development programs and their likely success," said Bill O'Shea, president of Bell Labs and Lucent's executive vice president for corporate strategy and marketing. "MS2 Accelerate has enabled us to automate and speed this process."

"MS2 takes our phase-gate process, PMA, and its associated business and quality metrics to measure our cross-functional teams performance and automates it in an easy- to-use, Web-based application," said Bob Martin, chief technology officer for Lucent's Bell Labs research and development arm.

Martin said the solution simplifies the work for cross-functional teams, including external partners, allowing everyone on a project to collaborate and execute on the process in a disciplined, consistent fashion.


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