Shrinking Design Cycles at Wireless Development House

Cellon International deploys Agile solution to bring customers' products to market faster

Cellon International deploys Agile solution to bring customers' products to market faster

San Jose, CA — January 9, 2004 — Cellon International, the world's largest independent wireless design and development house, has implemented a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution from Agile Software in a bid to shrink its design cycles and introduce best practices throughout the lifecycle of its products.

Cellon is a leading outsourcing house for the research, development and design of wireless handsets and other devices. The firm, which has shipped nearly 14 million units since 1999, serves global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide, including Philips and Siemens-Xelibri, as well as a number of Asian companies. Cellon maintains design and development centers in the United States, Canada, China and France.

The company has rolled out Agile's Product Collaboration solution to hundreds of users in the design and development center of Cellon France with the support of the PLM team from consultancy BearingPoint. Cellon's implementation in France is part of the firm's global deployment of Product Collaboration to help its OEM customers bring products to market faster.

"Faster time-to-market is the most important element of our value proposition to clients," said Yannick Le Nue, vice president of engineering at Cellon. "As such, it's crucial for us to take advantage of every opportunity to streamline product design and process management, and our implementation of Agile Product Collaboration is part of this effort."

Le Nue explained that the Agile PLM solution acts as a central management console that can help facilitate best practices across the product lifecycle. "We deployed the Agile solution to fully exploit process efficiencies that Cellon has achieved, including shrinking the product design cycle from eighteen months to less than six," Le Nue said.

In recent years, OEMs have increasingly leveraged outsourced manufacturing models to improve their profit margins and allow them to focus on core competencies. The shift toward outsourced design services represents the next evolution in the outsourcing movement, enabling OEMs to leverage existing design capabilities. However, this trend mandates that outsourcing companies have the scale and ability to manage multiple product development cycles. At each phase of a product lifecycle, management of a single product record is critical to providing the process visibility that enables cost- effective decisions and accelerated cycle times.

"With the Agile system in place, processes that once took days can now be run in a few hours and with greater accuracy," said Alain Parent, senior director of product support at Cellon France. "The ability to bring both speed and precision to product processes is extremely important to our customers. It can literally mean the difference between first-to-market status — with its associated margin and profitability advantages — or playing catch-up."
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