Challenges and rewards of mechanical platforming strategy within wireless handset industry

The internship project studied Motorola competitors' products and identified their mechanical platform strategy. Recommendations were developed for Motorola to improve product development and/or portfolio planning, in terms of hitting key performance parameters for design differentiation, field failure rates, supply chain scale and efficiencies, etc. Motorola is improving its product differentiation in the highly competitive and fast-clockspeed wireless handset industry. This project was primarily aimed at understanding competitors' approaches to mechanical platforming and the relationship to product differentiation and quality. This study can also help to clarify Motorola internal definition of platform and of innovation, and facilitate better communication within different groups. The competitive analysis focused on Samsung and Nokia. The study relied mostly on informal interviews with engineers and managers to gain understanding of Motorola internal process and practices. The majority of the competitive information came from internal benchmarking teardowns, 3rd-party teardown reports, and public information on FCC website. Recommendations include that Motorola should leverage on its own "winning design".

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Pan, Ying, M.B.A. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daniel Whitney and Steven Eppinger.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37245

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37245