Share Resources on Unified Technology Platform

The wave of knowledge economy and information revolution has swept over the world and had a great impact on the development of world economy, which inevitably changes the management mode and development strategy of telecom enterprises. In the process, technical resources bring enterprises not only more business opportunities but also greater challenges to technology management.

Sharing Technical Resources to Make Added Benefits

Technical resources can be shared by nature, but the same resource can be utilized in different ways and in different environments. Generally, people develop a technology for a specific usage, but the technology can often be used for multiple purposes. Therefore, an enterprise should integrate its technical resources and enable them to be shared by staff members in order to add more value to its technology development.

The development of a product is an innovative activity, and also an activity that makes improvements to the existing technology. The application of the existing standard models, matured design methods and management experiences can help the development of new products with shortened research time and reduced cost, which certainly enhances the competitiveness of enterprises.

A few world famous enterprises have already made great strides through the resource sharing. From 1984, it took HP about ten years to raise the reusage rate of its firmware to 25%-50%, and the reusage rate of some products even reached 83%. Currently, in AT&T, the reusage rate of its telecom operational support system software ranges from 40% to 90%. And Ericsson´s AXE exchange system was perfectly deployed in hundreds of customized configurations with the reusage rate of 90%.

The return from reduced reusage rate is evident: the product launch time was reduced by 50%-80%, bugs reduced by 80%-90%, maintenance cost reduced by 80%-90%, software development cost reduced by 85%, long-term projects cost reduced by 25%.

In addition, the resource sharing and reusage also brought these enterprises invisible but meaningful benefits including the reconfigurable systems that can fully satisfy users´ demands, the flexible adaptability to the market, series products with similar or compatible interfaces, etc.

Building Technology Platform with Enterprise Strength

ZTE is the largest listed telecom equipment manufacturer in China. It has achieved consistent rapid growth during the last 10 years. In 2002, in contrast to the stagnant IT market all over the world, ZTE still made a moderate increase in its sales through many efforts (annual turnover amounted to 130 billion USD).

After years of technology accumulation, ZTE has mastered a lot of state-of-the-art technologies, including some core technologies. But, to be a first class enterprise in the world, it is necessary to deploy more advanced methods for technology management and greatly improve the efficiency of R&D. Therefore, based on its operation status and the requirements of the market, ZTE implemented a strategy of building a unified technology platform for R&D management in order to effectively realize the sharing of its technical resources.

Mr. Hou Weigui, President of ZTE, puts a high value on resource sharing. He said it´s important to organize well and share technical resources for the efficiency enhancement of R&D.

In order to summarize the successful management methods and lessons of failure in the development of various products at different stages and make them sharable resources, it is most important to set a bearer for sharing resources. The bearer is a technology platform, which enables the realization of resource sharing. ZTE has taken a series of measures to initiate resource sharing work, such as launching the modularization move and setting up the module resource base, etc.

In ZTE, the modularization work has been going well and dozens of module libraries have been setup. In 2003, a software and hardware technology platform was established, aimed at collecting some matured technologies, which can be fully or partly shared by different products, to formulate specifications and help product lines to improve the design of new products and the maintenance of the platform itself.

The technology platform of hardware and software has the following features:

• It is the integration of basic resources of product series.
• It is on the basis of standardization, normalization and serialization.
• HR sharing is required along with technology sharing.

The next target of the resource sharing work is to promote the construction of a product-architecture-based   basic   platform  (including software and hardware architectures), in order that the development of products can satisfactorily meet users´ demands and be sensitive to the market, thus shaping fully compatible product series and sharpening the competitive edge of ZTE.

Making Best Use of Technology Platform to Promote Enterprise Development

Resource sharing may bring enterprises tremendous economic profits, but it can only be guaranteed by adhering to corresponding rules and regulations to make full use of the technology platform.

ZTE has set down relevant regulations for the use, maintenance and upgrade of its technology platform. For example, to the utilization of the platform, it is stipulated that the systematic structure in a new product should take priority of adopting a scheme from the technology platform, as do the peripheral circuits and application sub-programs.

In addition, the technology platform can also provide powerful technical support for the application of various products. For the dynamic maintenance and upgrade of the platform, it is stipulated that the developer of new products should evaluate all the software and hardware modules adopted by new products, and deliver an assessment report with possible modification suggestions. Then the assessment report is tested and verified at the platform. The technical findings from the R&D of new products should be collected into the technical resource database to enrich and upgrade the platform.

With the continuous development of ZTE, its technology platform will become the infrastructure of resource sharing and the guarantee of successful R&D of new products, and play a significant role in shortening the research cycle, increasing the R&D efficiency, improving the design quality, reducing the product cost and enhancing the comprehensive competitiveness of products.