Organization Structure, Processes and Design project on Magma Design Automation Essays

Organization Structure, Processes and Design project on Magma Design Automation Essays Organization Structure, Processes and Design project on Magma Design Automation Paper Organization Structure, Processes and Design project on Magma Design Automation Paper Magma Design Automation is a fast-growing provider of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software and design services. The company was founded in 1997 on the concept of combining logic design and physical design into a single system to better address emerging deep sub-micron design challenges. MDA is headquartered in Silicon Valley and has a global network of sales support personnel. Magma markets and supports its products through sales and support centers in North America, Europe, Japan, India and Asia-Pacific nations. Magma has grown substantially over the years to achieve sales of over $75 million in 2003. Magmas mission To create and deliver the best EDA software products and solutions, encompassing IC design from concept to completion, enabling our customers commercial success. Magmas Products Magma Design Automation provides electronic design automation (EDA) software that enables chip designers to meet critical time-to-market objectives, improve chip performance and handle multimillion-gate designs. Key products include Blast Create(tm), Blast Plan(tm), Blast Fusion(r) and Blast Noise(r). Magma software products comprise the only truly integrated RTL-to-GDSII design flow. Magmas Customers Magma licenses its design automation software to semiconductor manufacturers and electronic products companies around the world. Among them: Broadcom, Infineon, NEC, Texas Instruments, Toshiba and Vitesse. Need to expand operations ASIC/VLSI development business was rapidly shifting its base from US to India in the later half of 90s. As they form the main customers of Magma, it also needed to follow the change. The main reasons for the start of the Indian operations are: 1. Close proximity to the clients: Magma caters to the multinational companies like Texas Instruments etc, globally. So to support these operations they also have to start their operation in India. 2. High quality manpower and low cost: The availability of the pool of talented engineers in India at low cost was also a reason for the shift. 3. Faster Response Time: Being present locally will also provide the faster response time for the maintenance and support. With these considerations in mind, the company opened its first Indian office at Bangalore in May 2003 with an initial work force of 25 people. The operative goals of the Indian operations are: 1. To upgrade its Indian operations so that it can cater to the Asia-pacific market and Japan, and at a later stage to European market as well. 2. To be amongst the top 3 EDA providers in India. 3. To provide new product development via its RD department for global operations so as to move up in the value hierarchy. Magma India is a part of a Global Matrix structure. The matrix structure helps the company to coordinate between the Indian operation and the parent company in both the product development as well as business development in whole of the globe. The company has three major departments viz. RD, Product Engineering and Field Application Engineering, along with support departments of Finance, Human Resource Development, Information Technology and Marketing. The company has a dual reporting structure with the team in India working alongside the team in the different regions on the same product. Various divisions in different operations Organization structure of Magma design automation Work flows in Magma with the use of cross-functional teams, chosen on geographical and divisional basis as required by the project. The criterion for choosing the group leader is technical expertise. The employees then work on this temporary team till the project is completed. The employees keep moving from one project to another in this fashion in the same division. Each employee thus has a dual reporting structure. He reports to his project lead, in most cases in U.S., as well as the divisional head in India. The organization structure and design of Magma is mainly determined by five factors Organization Strategy and Goals External environment Organization life cycle and size Organizational Culture Technology Magma India follows a differentiation strategy for interacting with its competitive environment and in order to achieve organizational goals. The company attempts to distinguish its products from others in the EDA industry. The products of Magma India are differentiated on the basis of technology, architecture and the features offered by them. The EDA tools offered by Magma are of high quality and they are priced high. Magma is committed to differentiate its products from others in the industry and for this it invests heavily in RD, product research and has got tie ups with other companies to market its products. In order to differentiate its products and to keep a competitive edge, Magma has got a strong RD division. Magma has got a strong customer focus and its FAE department continuously interacts with customers. IT also sends its RD people to customer sites and forms cross-functional teams, if there is such a requirement, at the customer site. Thus, Magma India wants to have the structure and culture of a learning organization and rewards its employees for creativity and innovation. The organizations ability to be flexible is constrained by its divisional architecture. This can be a severe problem as Magma India grows in size. To overcome the disadvantages of the divisional structure in the long term, it should establish strong formal horizontal linkages between divisions. This will increase coordination and add flexibility to the organization. The sector in which Magma India is operating is highly dynamic with lots of activity going on. On one hand small companies are coming fast to fill the niche whereas the old companies are consolidating to retain their matte. Also the environment becomes highly unstable due to the extensive dependence of this sector on the emerging technology. Its main competitors are Cadence, Synopsis, and Mentor Graphics etc. The requirements of the customer are also changing i.e. change of the design due to advent of nanometer technology. There are only a few number of external complexities that means only few external elements are relevant to the company. For Magma, these are changes in technology and clients. Therefore the company is in simple environmental complexity and unstable environmental change. Therefore company shares a moderate to high uncertainty.