SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANCY

Objective

Our client wished to update and expand their product range, to increase their competitive edge and enable new market opportunities. SOLA was engaged to analyse the existing product range and to recommend a selection of product architectures that would provide immediate benefits to existing products, but that also provided a flexible yet powerful platform for new products in the future.

To provide a clear objective, we worked with the client to help them identify the key factors that would influence product success.

We began by performing a comprehensive audit of the existing products, to generate a baseline performance requirement. We then superimposed upon this the requirements identified for future products. A crucial aspect of this analysis was backward compatibility with a fixed infrastructure within which the new products needed to operate.

Working with our client's marketing department, we facilitated the development of the product specifications, by assessing technical feasibility, unit cost implications and other such criteria.

Our approach resulted in the development of three candidate product architectures. Each achieved a slightly different trade-off between the critical success factors identified at the start of the project. We then facilitated our client's selection of a preferred architecture, to form the basis for onward development.

The chosen architecture provided substantial unit cost, manufacturing and radio performance improvements over existing products. Further, it enabled a number of new product concepts to be realised, through its inherent flexibility and scalability.

The architecture formed the successful basis for onward development and resulted in SOLA being engaged to implement the design over a two year development programme, with further follow on activities beyond that time.