Cambridge based Nujira is the world leader in Envelope Tracking (ET) technology for powering energy-efficient 4G cellular terminals, base stations and digital broadcast transmitters.
Nujira’s Coolteq products, for example, power the world’s most energy efficient 4G cellular base stations and digital TV transmitters. Building on this success, Nujira is now applying the same energy efficient technology to smartphones and other portable wireless devices.
Manual engineering processes
Hitherto, Nujira had been using a component management database (initially considered sufficient for its needs), but as the company grew, it proved inadequate – particularly with regard to the control of information such as Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) and product documentation.
For example, when checking an ECO, engineers would have to compare the previous parts list with the new parts list line by line in a spreadsheet or on a paper record. This process was open to error and often took up to a day complete, as they would always double check it for accuracy.
In addition, Nujira had to address concerns associated with silos of information that were a consequence of their manual processes. Nujira’s CAD engineering manager, Richard Sharples determined to find a solution to this problem and help his company gain better control over its engineering data and processes.
“Once a product is in production and a company commits to volume and money any mistake in a Bill of Material propagates throughout,” says Mr Sharples. “We had silos of information that were the result of people creating and saving documents locally and we continuously ran the risk of someone using outdated information.”
Issues arising from the despatch of erroneous data to a contract manufacturer could potentially cost tens of thousands of pounds. Nujira needed a central location to manage and access engineering information in order to eliminate tedious searches for information on the network or the loss of information altogether.
While ensuring accuracy of the data was of critical importance, Nujira also wanted a system that would easily integrate with its existing engineering design automation (EDA) tools from Mentor Graphics. Indeed, it was Nujira’s own EDA product sales and support partner, Saros that suggested the company might consider Omnify Software’s Empower PLM application as a possible solution to its data management problems.
This would provide Nujira with a central location to manage and access product information, automate their ECO, bill of Material and document management processes, as well as providing the all-important integration with Mentor Graphics’ Expedition PCB design environment.
Nujira duly implemented Empower PLM within its Engineering department (initially design and production). Working alongside Saros and Omnify Software’s application engineer, the company converted its existing component database; all testing, including the integration with Mentor Graphics Expedition PCB, was completed within a month. The product was then rolled out to the test engineers’ section.
Accuracy, time savings and peace of mind
Now that manual editing of information has been eliminated from Nujira’s data management processes, the company has been able to narrow the window of opportunity to make mistakes, which has saved it a great deal of time and, ultimately a great deal of money. Richard Sharples again:
“We selected Omnify Empower PLM mainly because it had proven, out-of-the-box integration to our Mentor Graphics tools. Design engineers are now able to utilise the power of the database by selecting components directly from Empower PLM and placing them onto schematics.
"Our previous process to import a parts list from a schematic took well over an hour to complete and now it takes only a few minutes. In addition, checking an ECO has been reduced from a full day to only a matter of seconds with Empower PLM’s redlining capability.”
Empower PLM has provided Nujira with better change, revision and documentation controls, and the company now enjoys a smoother product development cycle through automated processes and centralised information.
“We now have very, very good control over our engineering data,” Mr. Sharples concludes. “With Empower PLM, engineers can go to a central location to access accurate and up-to-date information and it gives us the confidence that the latest documents, BOMs and changes are in fact the most current versions.”
*Envelope tracking is a power supply technique for improving the energy efficiency of radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers. It replaces the fixed dc supply voltage to the RF power amplifier with a dynamic supply voltage that closely tracks the amplitude, or ‘envelope’ of the transmitted RF signal.