Nokia takes worldwide grip on producing phone variants

Handset giant customizes devices for operator and country specific services at its centers around the world – outsources part of the process.

Once developed, Nokia’s new devices have to be customized to operator and country requirements. This includes default content and settings, services and applications. Pia Kantola, who is global head of product customization at Nokia, leads the group.

“My team needs to take all operator requirements into consideration,” says Pia, “including services such as email, wireless LAN, MMS, branding and User Interface. We also customize the menu structure and links to specific operator services that enable consumers to download content such as music, wallpapers and screen savers. As you can imagine, there are cultural and language differences on what we offer. The demands of Indian consumers are different than those in Germany”.

Pia cited the largest increase in demand from operators was installing and integrating applications such as games, music players, navigation services or one-touch access to facebook, to give consumers a greater experience and differentiate the operator brand. These services are either loaded onto a memory card, or embedded into the device.

Outsourcing global services

As workloads grow and demands become ever more complex and specified, Nokia outsources some of the more routine tasks to various suppliers who have the ability to help them on a global basis. One of these suppliers is Swedish based Teleca. “We have specialists working on our proprietary series 30 and series 40 terminals in Dallas (USA) and Chengdu (China). In Lodz (Poland) and Tampere (Finland) we work with Symbian-based Series 60 terminals. This work also includes a large amount of maintenance work throughout the entire product lifecycle," says Tomi Rantakari, Vice President Strategic Accounts Europe.

End-to-end capabilities

“At a supplier level, we need companies with the capability to create variants from customer specification to future products,” continues Pia. “ Suppliers need to be able to offer on-site support, negotiating with the Nokia people who deal with customers about what to implement before phones go to the factory for release. Their offsite delivery engineers must then have the capability to build and test the variants, performing software R&D.”

Innovative approaches to aggressive schedules

Pia explained that Nokia works to an extremely aggressive schedule, and has the need for flexible, innovative suppliers. “We require suppliers to show flexibility and scalability in an extremely unpredictable and fast-moving market,” she says. “They need to react in days rather than weeks which demands a lot of innovation. While everyone has holidays, sick leave, etc, we need to count on companies to handle any request in the given time. Certain periods are crucial for us – for example, the summer, Chinese New Year and Christmas are very taxing on resources. And the clock is ticking ever faster. Soon we will expect lead-times of hours rather than days.”

A concrete example is software maintenance. All software maintenance releases are performed over the air, and consumers want them immediately after release. All variants have to be maintained prior to any software release.

Extending into the future

Pia explained that Nokia was currently ramping up existing delivery capabilities on a weekly basis, and needed companies who could supply engineers to match these fluctuating demands. “We choose companies who offer global services who can fulfill our requirements of flexibility, technical competence and scale. With good partners we can continue to match, and where possible, surpass the expectations of our operators and national customers.”