Founded in 1984, Dell Inc. is the leading provider of computer systems worldwide. In the last fiscal year, unit shipments increased 19 percent and an industry milestone was achieved with more than 10 million units sold in the fourth quarter. As a consistent market segment leader, Dell has excelled due to its determined focus on delivering unparalleled customer service through a direct sales model. Every system is built to a customer's order, and there are no retailers that add additional cost to the products. Instead, each customer is offered an impressive selection of choices and solutions that are customized to their needs through the Web site, Dell.com, and telephone consultations. Products are delivered directly to the customer's door.
But improving on an industry-leading business model can be a challenge. One out of every three computer systems sold in the U.S. is built by Dell. When corporate management called for a new manufacturing facility to be built to meet the burgeoning need in the Americas—sales increased 11 percent over the previous year—the ambitious goal was to build a 750,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art manufacturing complex from the ground up and ship products—"from dirt to Dell"—in just nine months.
Additionally, the team charged with building Dell's newest and largest manufacturing center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was challenged to achieve even greater operational efficiencies than the company has deployed in its six other manufacturing facilities by placing an increased emphasis on information technology solutions. Another goal, termed "Global Copy Exact," was to establish a finely tuned manufacturing process that could be rolled out at any future Dell manufacturing facility in the world.
To accomplish its goal, the Dell team at Winston-Salem (WS1) deployed Dell products as well as specialized manufacturing, operations, and shipping software, all of which use Microsoft technologies.
Dell has been using Microsoft .NET technologies throughout its business operations for the past several years. Specifically, the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework have been key to developing an integrated customer service and support system. The Integrated Dell Desktop (IDD), based on Microsoft software, enables ground-up support for the sales process and call center operations. With IDD, Dell sales representatives work with a single, easy-to-use desktop application that harnesses the power of Web services. This smart-client application has been readily adopted throughout the company in part because it runs on a user's local device and intelligently connects to other systems. The benefits realized include significantly improved internal sales operations as well as an enhanced customer experience.
But the full power of information technology in terms of manufacturing and shipping was harnessed first at Dell's most technologically advanced manufacturing center, WS1. Here Dell's commitment to custom-build every customer's order—whether the order is for 1,000 computers or 1—is most evident.
At the WS1 facility, manufacturing and shipping operations are 15 percent more efficient than at other Dell facilities. This amounts to significant savings considering that building the average computer requires 138 separate steps.
The information technology infrastructure at the plant, consisting of Dell systems using Microsoft technologies and integrating specialized software, ensures that every step of a customer order can be tracked and monitored. The result is that orders can be received online, processed, built, and prepared for shipment within a matter of hours and with extremely high quality and efficiency.
The "Dell on Dell" strategy emphasizes the use of Dell technology to accomplish the myriad of complex tasks involved in the manufacturing and delivery process, including all the transactional and processing needs. The Microsoft .NET suite of development tools has enabled Dell to architect systems that seamlessly use the power of Dell's infrastructure while integrating key partner software solutions.
These applications include GE Fanuc's Cimplicity, which controls various internal operations, and ION from Manhattan Associates for shipping operations.
Dell server and desktop products serve as the foundation for a tightly integrated system that relies on the prebuilt components and tools of the Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft clustering technologies to ensure that its systems are highly available and operate seamlessly.
After the Winston-Salem facility team met its "from dirt to Dell" goal of nine months and production began, the goal of producing a computer every 2 1/2 to 3 seconds was soon achieved. Dell's newest and largest manufacturing facility was designed to be more efficient than other Dell manufacturing facilities, but other benefits were realized as well.
"Our non-legacy 'Dell on Dell' architecture enables us to ramp up quickly with high system up-time. This plant was designed to be 15 percent more efficient than any other Dell facility, and we depend on our IT systems to do that," said Travis Simpson, vice president of Operations at the facility.
By placing an increased emphasis on IT solutions, WS1 improved on an already industry-leading model and developed a "Global Copy Exact" that served as a gold-standard model for future Dell manufacturing facilities.
"One of the key success factors we had with this project is to define a global manufacturing process that we can use in multiple facilities. This is the concept of ’Global Copy Exact’—to define a global manufacturing process and take that process to every facility we build in the future," said Ahmed Mahmoud, vice president of IT Global Manufacturing Fulfillment Systems at Dell.
The fine-tuned manufacturing process developed at WS1 used Dell products and technologies, specialized partner offerings, and Microsoft products, all tied together using the Microsoft .NET Framework.
"Our system and standards ensure that every product that leaves this facility is the highest standard and that our customers are always satisfied with the product that we produce," said Donna Oldham, senior manager of Communications.
"Operations at WS1 can be run totally electronically. The orders come in online, they’re electronically downloaded into our systems, flow through the plant, out the back end and shipped without any paper being developed or delivered," Simpson explained. "This frictionless environment enables us to receive the order and build the order in just a matter of hours with extremely high quality."
The Microsoft .NET Framework was key to successfully integrating Dell internal business and several partner applications to achieve seamless performance.
"We have utilized products like the Microsoft .NET architecture to re-architect our systems to bring them into the next generation of capabilities that enable that overall customer experience," said Susan Sheskey, vice president and chief information officer at Dell. "Standards-based technologies and tools like the Microsoft [.NET] suite enable us to run our business 'Dell on Dell.' It creates a sense of velocity, efficiency, reusability, and the ability to react in a very timely way that drives our business forward."
The efficiencies built into this system are four-fold: cost savings, greater reliability, enhanced customer experience, and improved performance.
- Cost Savings. Dell's commitment to building each unit to order for each and every customer—not to simply modify prebuilt units—is reflected in Dell's implementation of just-in-time manufacturing. Dell manufacturing facilities do not shelf an inventory of parts for production. Rather, in the Dell production model, inventory arrives at the manufacturing facility when production of the customer order begins. Efficiencies are realized through cost savings related to warehousing, inventory, and labor.
- Greater Reliability. This process was pioneered in the computer manufacturing industry by Dell, but the Web services–based operations at WS1 have yielded even greater efficiencies. Tracking and monitoring helps anticipate a production problem before it happens, and the system provides for an additional quality control process that complements those performed on the production line itself. At WS1, this has produced a greater reliability rating than any other Dell manufacturing facility.
- Enhanced Customer Experience. For the customer, this efficiency is reflected in a more favorable customer experience. An order for a new computer placed online or by telephone is generally processed, built, and prepared for shipment within a matter of hours.
- Improved Performance. While this production model produces a competitive advantage for Dell, the computer processing power to achieve it can be challenging. Dell deploys a horizontal scaling architecture, developed using Microsoft .NET, to use extra processing power when needed, which improves performance efficiencies.
"One of the things we've done at Dell is standardize on Microsoft .NET as one of the key technologies we use for custom development. We have found Microsoft .NET to be extremely reliable and scalable and is meeting all our needs," Mahmoud explains.
"The Microsoft .NET Framework provides us with a lot of prebuilt components and tools to choose from. We can focus on business logic rather than connectivity logic and lower-level things just by having that powerful framework behind Visual Studio," adds Richard Brown, Cimplicity development lead for IT Global Manufacturing Fulfillment Systems at Dell.
"There’s no one product out there that can support all the IT things that Dell needs to do to manufacture systems, so for each area we’ve gone and selected the best of breed for each of the types of applications," Brown says.
GE Fanuc's Cimplicity software serves as a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) layer that is used to monitor and control systems as well as to connect factory floor manufacturing, quality control, kitting, and other operations to the IT infrastructure. Shipping operations are managed by the ION product from Manhattan Associates.
"ION is the application space responsible for managing the warehouse management parts, mainly around speakers and monitors, as well as providing visibility to our customer from an outbound shipping standpoint. So it’s everything from warehouse management, to transportation rating and routing, to the customer itself," explains Lowell Kercheville, director of Outbound Logistics IT at Dell.
"All these applications, glued together through Microsoft technologies, help Dell do what it needs to do in manufacturing systems," Brown adds.
"When team members talk about the systems that they build, a lot of times they ask questions like 'Who’s going to create something wonderful on that Dell computer built in Winston-Salem?'," Oldham says.
Dell recently announced that the Winston-Salem facility shipped more than one million computers in just eight months after beginning production. The one-millionth unit was donated to a local high school in a ceremony attended by Dell Chairman Michael Dell and hundreds of WS1 employees. Additionally, the company announced that first-year employment figures at the facility surpassed the company's expectations by almost one-half, proof of the successes at the facility and benefits provided to the Winston-Salem community at large.
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