Sigma Wireless

3 . Opportunity & Key Success Factors

Since the appointment of Joseph Moore as Managing Director in 1998 Sigma Wireless’s strategic direction has significantly changed. Its important to understand a number of key changes that predated the eBusiness project and led to it being required.

The company in 2002 is around the same size in terms of revenue as it was in 1998 but the business and product line has been totally transformed. Non-core businesses (e.g. mobile accessories and power supplies) have been exited. The company has moved from its focus on the PMR segment to developing a 90% market share within the TETRA niche and are now looking to develop a similarly strong position in the emerging 3G segment.

According to Joseph the problem was that Sigma Wireless had become “A Jack of all trades and a master of none.”

The new mission statement signalled the new and focused strategic intent:
“To be a World Class designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative antenna and antenna-related product solutions, worldwide.”

The vision statement underlines the ambition that drives the mission:
“Double our business every two years.”

To achieve this kind of growth it was critical for Sigma Wireless to align their internal capabilities to ensure sufficient business capacity. The first step in this process was kicking off the “Change to Compete” project. They employed a consulting firm who supplied four consultants who spent 9 months working on a complete reengineering of all manufacturing processes. This involved all the manufacturing staff undertaking cross training and the development of a multi-skilled workforce. At the same time they embarked upon an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation in order to integrate key business processes and build upon the success of the “Change to Compete” project.

Both the “Change to Compete” and ERP projects were significant successes but the eBusiness project was designed to take the company further towards the realisation of their strategic objective of moving up the value chain into the solution business. In order to deliver ‘solutions’ they needed to offer engineering expertise at a much higher level. Joseph Moore commented as follows, “It’s not a matter of sending out a data sheet, offering a price and hoping customers select you. It’s a matter of being able to go in, identify customer’s problems, pick the right solution and deliver it.”

This “customer intimacy” business model had been successfully demonstrated in a couple of key assignments. For example, Dolphin in the UK had contracted Sigma Wireless to supply 100% of their antennas. The key to success of this project had been close and deep liaison with the customer’s engineers in order to create a first class solution. Due to the improvements created by the “Change to Compete” project Sigma Wireless had the manufacturing capacity to double output without increasing overheads. The challenge they faced was how to obtain a tenfold increase in customers but not incur a tenfold increase in sales and marketing and R&D costs.

Traditionally the sales team would liase with Sigma Wireless’s engineers in order to get solutions to customer’s problems. However, this was proving inefficient for two reasons:

• Knowledge created in these discussions was not being effectively captured for reuse across the organisation.
• Engineers couldn’t concentrate on their design work. The solution was to put an effective knowledge gathering and management system in and this was the objective of the eBusiness project. During the business planning process a number of critical success factors were established:
• Achieve goal of doubling turnover every two years
• Establish a new business model to make Sigma Wireless more effective
• Facilitate a virtual company
• Establish Sigma Wireless as a centre of excellence for engineering, both in terms of capability and perception
• Achieve the following marketing positioning:

“Think 3G Antennas – Think Sigma Wireless.”