David Chavez, Lab Director, GDNT R&D Center

Hello, everyone. It’s a great honor and privilege to be given the opportunity to take on the role of Lab Director of GDNT R&D Centre, taking over from Spenser Williams who’s returned to North America.  Let me once again extend my appreciation to Spenser for his dedication and support of Nortel China and GDNT R&D labs in Beijing and Guangzhou, respectively, over the last three years.  His leadership is greatly appreciated and I will work to build on his success.  At this point, I would like to thank Dean Tremaine also for three years of contributions towards significantly improving capabilities within GDNT R&D Centre.  Dean is shortly leaving us to return back to North America.  I will also be taking over Dean’s role as Leader, LTE BTS Applications, Wireless Mesh, and Wireless LAN.  My adoption of both roles, as well as that of GDNT leader for LTE Development, is consistent with Nortel’s goals to evolve GDNT R&D Lab towards 4G development.

Now allow me to introduce myself.  I was born in Manila, in the Philippines, then moved to Canada where I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Engineering Physics.  After graduation, I worked in a small photoconductor manufacturing company.  I had the opportunity with that company to travel to Guangzhou for the first time in 1986.  Even back then, I found Guangzhou and its people to be very friendly and business-oriented.  Therefore, I am very happy to be able to live and work here with you.

I joined Nortel in 1988.  Throughout my career in Nortel, I’ve had great opportunities to work in a wide variety of roles in Global Operations and R&D.  I’ve been in Component Engineering, Quality Engineering, New Product Introduction, Hardware Development, and then Software Development. In these roles, I worked on AMPS, TDMA, CT2+, GSM, UMTS, CDMA, and most recently LTE, where I am also currently Director of LTE BTS Platform Software. Prior to this last role, I was Director of CDMA BTS Software during which I worked extensively with GDNT R&D to transfer this product such that it is now 100% owned by GDNT.  Over the course of this project, I had the privilege of meeting and working with many people in GDNT R&D who are very talented and highly motivated. I found so much energy and potential within the GDNT team that I wanted to be a part of it.  This is why I find myself here now, writing to you today.  I hope I can indeed help the team harness its energy and tremendous potential.

We in GDNT R&D have a great responsibility as one of Nortel’s full-service, end to end R&D sites.  To live up to the trust that Nortel has placed on us, and as a unifying vision for the lab, I would like us to push ourselves to add greater and greater value to our customers and to our company.  It is not enough for us to simply be a lower cost R&D centre. That advantage is temporary and not guaranteed due to inflation and currency exchange rates shifting with changing global economic conditions.  Moreover, being a low cost lab is hardly the basis for a motivating, unifying goal.  Now imagine instead the unifying goal of driving GDNT to become a lab that provides the highest value to our customers and to our company, driving to be a “High Performance Lab.”  Put simply, a High Performance Lab is a design organization that leads in Quality, Productivity, Innovation, ESAT, and R&D Thought Leadership.  Getting there means defining a set of metrics in each of these areas by which we will measure ourselves, and then driving continuous improvement of those metrics using many of the tools we already have, such as “Own It” and “Lean Six Sigma”. As an example, for Quality, we can measure defects in the software that we deliver at the Customer Ready milestone. That is, the defects that escape from our internal processes and get into the field.  The lower we can drive this metric, the better our Quality performance. 

I see teams within GDNT that already perform well on this metric and look forward to these teams sharing their methods with others in the lab to boost our collective performance.  In a similar way, we can find best practices in the lab on Productivity or any of the other areas listed above.  These practices can also be shared across and, indeed, beyond the lab.

To find out more about this vision of a “High Performance Lab”, ask your GDNT manager for an overview.  The only way we will achieve this vision is through the collective will and effort of everybody in GDNT R&D Centre so it is important that, first, we all know what it means.  I look forward to hearing about ideas you may have on this vision, and more importantly, look forward to your helping us get there.  It will be a lot of work but I guarantee you will undergo personal learning and development.

Thank you. I hope to meet as many of you as possible over the weeks and months ahead.