Case Study: Motorola

Motorola is widely considered the pioneer of roadmapping. The company initially began using roadmaps in the 1980s to forecast market requirements, predict the availability of key technologies and plan product development accordingly. During the 80s and early 90s, roadmaps were popularized by former Motorola CEO, Robert Galvin, and he is widely quoted in speeches crediting Motorola's success in the marketplace to their technology roadmapping process.

Today, this pioneer uses Alignent's software solutions as their single, company-wide system for all roadmapping information. With Alignent, Motorola's disciplined roadmapping process is now highly collaborative, easy to build upon year-over-year, and tightly connects all business units across the worldwide company.

"Vision Strategist is a powerful, enterprise software solution that supports the strategic roadmapping process… it is the common software solution that supports our process of strategic roadmapping and goal of 'One Motorola Roadmap'."

Tony Piecz
Manager of Planning Solutions
Motorola

The Challenge

Motorola, a global communications leader and Fortune 100 company, has long relied on strategic roadmaps to identify new technology and market opportunities. After decades of roadmapping, the company found itself with a "problem of riches" by 2001— Motorola now needed a better way to track and organize the tens of thousands of product roadmap documents distributed across the enterprise. Roadmaps were fueling the company's strategy and innovation practices, but the physical documents were becoming cumbersome to manage.

As Motorola evaluated its evolving roadmapping needs, the company's leaders determined that they not only needed a single system to manage enterprise-wide roadmapping information, they also needed a system that could accomplish six key requirements:

  1. Improve innovation planning and collaboration across distributed business units
  2. Forecast emerging technologies, products and markets, including monitoring external and internal innovation factors
  3. Capitalize on strategic planning data instead of re-planning from ground zero each year
  4. Identify instances where the company could increase technology re-use, inserting platform technology into the new product development process to leverage time and resources
  5. Minimize duplicative product planning efforts in departmental silos across the globe
  6. Implement strategic planning software that incorporates roadmapping best practices into the tool, providing a central repository where roadmaps can be accessed and stored

The Solution

Motorola explored various options that could scale and support long-range global innovation planning efforts. After an extensive search, Motorola selected Alignent as its roadmapping partner.

"With Vision Strategist, we can create multi-dimensional views of roadmaps that set our expectations for the minimum set of information needed to make better decisions," said Tony Piecz, Manager of Planning Solutions at Motorola.

The team at Motorola was also impressed with the software's ability to provide visibility into future plans and critical relationships over time. Executives valued the ability to exchange real-time planning information, and receiving automatic updates and alerts when roadmaps changed.

"We found when we didn't have a central database, we had a lot of Excel spreadsheets, Access databases and PowerPoint presentations. It was counter-intuitive to the effort of getting everyone on the same page. With a centralized tool, all the data is in one place, and those who need to access it are able to," added Piecz.

The Value

Motorola has now deployed Alignent's software in more than nine countries around the world. The company has reported savings of more than $100 million by consolidating strategic planning projects across various business units. Planning teams continuously update roadmaps to reflect changes in markets, customer needs and competitive activity. Individuals across business units collaborate via online strategy meetings where they give and receive feedback on strategic product plans and roadmaps.