Global Production Network of Dell - Case Study Example

Dell’s Service Partners

Dell has different arrangements that involve extensive business partner to assist provide customer service. Since its strategy to target the small and medium customers and production of servers, the company has partnered with a choice of organizations to deliver the services worldwide including system integration, repair and service and consulting (Serwer 2002). For system integration, the company partners with Electronic Data Systems for procurements, installation of the Dell servers and linking them to the end consumers. While most of the service incidences can be handled in the call centers, the company partners with firms as IBM, Wang, and BancTec to offer the field service and repair. Arthur Andersen and Gen is a consulting firm located in U.S. that partner with Dell to provide consulting services to an organization that desires to follow the success of Dell.

Operations

Dell does not outsource the final assembly of the products but subassemblies as motherboards and bare-bones PCs and nearly a full notebook PCs. In general, the organization fancy maintaining control of the essential final assembly and configuration of the PCs. This helps avoid unnecessary competition associated with the outsourcing of the complete products (Yang and Coe 2009).

The production of the Dell products is supported by a network of suppliers and contract manufacturers. The decision regarding sourcing, procurement, and product development are all enacted in Austin with participation from the regions (Kumar and Craig 2007). The sourcing is global implying that the sources of the main components for the countries is from the headquarters making the company consolidate its buying power and better terms from the suppliers.

While sourcing of the main components is central, sourcing of the consumable is done locally from the low-cost regions and local producers. For instance, the EMEA monitors are sourced from Samsung, Sony, and Acer but are also purchased locally from Philips and Nokia due to the product specification and affordable prices (Ernst and Kim 2002). For the supplier of the primary components, the company works with firms with global capabilities such as IBM, Samsung, SCI, Seagate among others. For efficiency, the company deals with few suppliers for specific products: for example disk drives are only supplied by Maxtor, IBM, Seagate and Western Digital.

Dell suppliers are needed to have an inventory near the manufacturing center to support the production. The suppliers can produce in a different place and ship to the centers or build a production site nearby (Lüthje 2002). For example, in some of the plants as those in America, EMEA, and Asia, the components are kept in trucks supported with the delivery documents that are pulled as required. The suppliers maintain the ownership of the entire stock pending the assembly line components operations.

Conclusion

From the discussion, it is evident Dell has a wider region of global operations from America to Europe and from Asia to Africa. The company works with various suppliers for components used to manufacture the PCs. Each of the regions has their assembly centers that ensure customer demands are met. With these global networks, Dell is one of the biggest producers of PCs around the world.