The Operations Management Principles of Dell, Research Paper Example

The operations management principles of Dell, founded in 1984, and currently ranked 51th on the Future 500 list have important impact on the overall performance of the company. Dell is constantly looking for ways to improve project management, productivity, and customer reputation. The below review of Dell’s innovative approach towards project management will examine the impact of the company’s Workload Automation project on the overall company performance.

The Enterprise Management Associates, Inc (2008) created a detailed case study about Dell’s workload automation system, and called it an integrative approach. According to the report, Dell mainly focused on aligning IT workload and service levels with the needs of business; increasing performance, customer satisfaction, productivity, and scheduling capabilities of the company. It has already been mentioned that Dell focuses on minimum inventory and maximum customization to serve customers better (Chase, Jacobs & Aqualino, 2006). This means that in order to keep inventory down and delivery times short, there was a need for an advanced IT system that aligned demand for products with production. Dell managed to integrate various systems within the organization, to ensure that all departments are able to effectively communicate. The main goal of Dell, back in 2002 was to increase the production efficiency, productivity, and reliability, resulting in increased customer satisfaction. By choosing the BMC’s CONTROL-M solution to integrate communication, reporting, scheduling, and resource planning, the company focused on the most important features that would generate better customer outcomes. These were: flexibility, compatibility with all servers (Windows and Linux), ease of installation, use, and a layered architecture (Enterprise Management Associates, Inc., 2008, p. 3). The system involved vendor support, integration with the Event Manager system, the Batch Impact Manager, and other monitoring central applications within the organization. As a result, all enterprise job scheduling within the company (all locations) has been consolidated. Further, the company managed to reduce operations costs, by reducing staff levels. Monitoring was automated, therefore, there was no need for roles reporting on it. The most important aspect of the project was that Dell created a service-driven management approach (Enterprise Management Associates, Inc., 2008, p. 5), instead of the previous, time-driven strategy of operations management. Workflow was mapped out in the system, and followed up from end-to-end.

The benefits for the entire organization, described by BMC Software (2009) included: higher rate of compliance in monitoring tasks, due to reduced risk of human error, reducing the number of trouble tickets by 75 percent (BMC Software, 2009, p. 1) and allowing the optimization of server usage. This, in turn resulted in higher level of efficiency, increased performance, and customer satisfaction. However, it is important to note that Dell has faced several challenges when implementing PERT and CRM. First of all: the different operation systems had to be made compatible, secondly, the company operated in 75 different locations. Likewise, performance management monitoring integration was a hard task, as there were different systems already operating in the organization. Centralization of systems was crucial. Providing online support for customers through dedicated systems and scheduling support tickets, jobs, and tasks is, however, a method that can further increase customer satisfaction. As Dell has eliminated middlemen in the distribution channel of its products, the main challenges of implementing an efficient customer support system and relationship management are: cost-effectiveness, consistency, and relationship, customer knowledge building. Klinker, Terrell, & Mahfouz (2006, p. 88) Dell uses databases to create customer segments, and utilizes “Premier Pages” displaying relevant customer data.

References

BCM Software. (2009) Customer success: Dell Sees substantial gains from BMC. Bloomberg. Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news? pid=newsarchive&sid=aQ66oPxl0rig

Chase, R., Jacobs, F. & Aqualino, N. (2006) Operations management for competitive advantage. 11Th Ed. McGraw Hill, New York.

Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. (2008) Dell’s SMART approach to workload automation. White Paper. Retrieved from http://media.cms.bmc.com/documents/Dell_ITWA_Case_Study.pdf

Klinker, S., Terrell, R., Mahfouz, A. (2006) Dell’s use of CRM-SCM integration to dominate the PC market. Communications of the IIMA. 2006 Volume 6 Issue 3