bella case

As Bella India was enjoying its first product development success, it also continued to demonstrate and improve its reengineering and cost-cutting capabilities. These competencies had enabled the Bangalore facility to capture significant savings with the 6-channel and 12-channel EKGs, Holter monitors, and defibrillators. Seeing these savings boost the bottom line, Bella’s senior team actively encouraged greater collaboration between headquarters and Bella India. The time between a product introduction in St. Louis and the transition to exclusive manufacturing in Bangalore continued to shrink. Increasingly, cost reduction opportunities were identified jointly by the Bangalore and St. Louis teams and incorporated into the initial product design.
With this capability well-developed and the successful launch of the Fiit X17, Cherian and St. Louis management agreed to tackle a new challenge in 2005: the joint development by St. Louis and Bella India of an entirely new product. Bella Healthcare initiated Project Baton to design a new, lower-cost stress test system to be used with treadmills. Stress test systems were expensive relative to resting and portable EKGs, but they had tremendous value in clinical diagnosis, and global demand for this product was strong. With Project Baton, the company would challenge this market segment by developing a more affordable offering. Bella Healthcare was not the only player attempting to do this, and it was clear from the outset that manufacturing costs would have to be very low to win market share.1
In practical terms, the Project Baton team had to design a wholly new system, source all new components, and program new filtering algorithms. Ambitious targets were set for Project Baton— the company aimed to complete development and begin production in 24 months, significantly faster than comparable projects, while