Innovation Leadership Summit: Collaboration speeds up our time-to-market (Adtran)

Located in Huntsville Alabama, Adtran, a telecommunication OEM manufacturer presented at the 2012 Innovation Leadership Summit.

Global collaboration is one of Adtran’s business imperatives. How to ensure global engineering team to stay at the same page is a key requirement to Adtran’s PLM solutions. “Technology doesn’t mean anything when people don’t know how to use it,” said Tom Dadmun in his presentation.

Tom Dadmun, vice president of Adtran’s program management office emphasized that the importance of change to ensure a company maintaining its competitive advantage. He quoted Jack Welch’s famous line: if your company is changing at a rate of speed slower that what’s changing on the outside the end is near.



Siemens PLM Software Teamcenter helps Adtran embrace changes across the enterprise worldwide simultaneously and gets everyone tied together.

Integrating social networking tools to collaborate better and also tie key customer in a private chat room to better understand their needs. “Clearly we want to make sure that collaboration speeds up our time- to-market (TTM). TTM is a significant KPI that we measure in our corporation. And being to market in time and ahead of your competitors is a key for us.”

Mobility and social networking are other factors help Adtran engineering community to collaborate on a shared platform and capture customer’s requirement efficiently. iPad is used through Adtran’s senior management team to monitor key performance indicators and for video conferencing. Adtran is looking at the new ways that Siemens PLM has tied in to the iPad as they move along (such as Teamcenter mobility).