Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator instruction] Our first question comes from Tore Svanberg from Thomas Weisel Partners.
Tore Svanberg - Thomas Weisel Partners
Yes. Just a couple of questions, first of all you talked a little bit about R&D efficiencies this year. I'm just wondering, how different is that from what you've done in the past. Have you put in some new programs? I'm just trying to understand a little bit what you mean by that?
Tunc Doluca - President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Well, we've done multiple things to improve this. And we also know that there are more things to do. First of all, the most important change that we have made is the business unit's collaboration effort. That's going to help immensely because we're having experts in each business unit together to make a combined product rather than each business unit trying to develop similarly functioning building blocks. We also invested heavily last year and continued to this year in moving the company to a EDA platform that's uniform and we believe that's also going to improve our efficiency. And thirdly, we are going to make sure that we form teams of people that are really adapting to the market needs for their particular product lines. In other words we've divided up groups where we take a group of sprinters or those that have to quickly develop a product in one group whereas others that are designing high-performance products in other groups. This way we set the right culture in each one of these organizations.
Bruce E. Kiddoo - Vice President, Finance
And this is Bruce. Additionally, as far as driving R&D efficiency by giving the profitability goal to each one of the business units, we're really making sure that all of our investments in R&D are going to be matched by acceptable financial returns. And so that's another area where we're really scrubbing where our investments are today and making sure that those are the best investments for us and we're allocating our scarce investment dollars most efficiently.
Tore Svanberg - Thomas Weisel Partners
Okay. Thanks. And just a follow-up. When should we expect to see a full benefit of the new Avnet relationship? I understand it's an ongoing one, but I am just trying to understand if there is a point in time where you will start to see a stronger impact?
Tunc Doluca - President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
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