戴尔DELL电子产品
Who’s Afraid of China?
By GARY RIVLIN
Published: December 19, 2004
SHAYNE MYHAND, the day-shift manager of Dell’s flagship factory here, does a lot of chaperoning. As many as four or five times a day, he finds himself playing host to corporate chieftains and midlevel scouts who come to marvel at the dazzlingly efficient assembly plant that may be the best hope for keeping blue-collar jobs in the United States.
A 31-year-old with a crisp, militarylike bearing, Mr. Myhand begins each tour the same way, moving to a display case and grabbing an unimpressive wooden plaque commemorating Dell’s production of 49,269 personal computers in the last three months of 1991. “On a good day, during peak demand, we’ll exceed that number by lunchtime,“ he said, with a slight nod and a faint smile gracing his lips. He told a visitor that even now, during the Christmas season rush, an order that hits the factory floor at 9 a.m. is typically stacked in the back of a truck motoring down an interstate highway by 1 p.m.
Inside Dell, the world’s largest computer maker, executives study the assembly process with the intensity of Alfred Kinsey and his researchers. They wheel in video equipment to examine a work team’s every movement, looking for any extraneous bends or wasted twists. Designers give one another high-fives for eliminating even a single screw from a product, because that represents a saving of roughly four seconds per machine built - the time they’ve calculated it takes an employee, on average, to use the pneumatic screwdriver dangling above his or her head.
Computer software clocks the assembly-line performance of workers, whether they’re putting together PC’s or the servers and storage equipment that Dell sells to large companies. The most able are declared “master builders“ and then videotaped so that others may watch and learn. The weak are told that it takes a special set of talents to cut it on the Dell factory floor - and shown the door.
Steely-eyed cold, to be sure, but at a time when economists and politicians fret over the future of American manufacturing as China emerges as the workshop of the world, Dell isn’t just defying a global trend; it’s helping to set the standard. “When everybody is outsourcing - when everybody is outsourcing - Dell continues to manufacture in the United States because over two decades of fine-tuning, they’ve figured out how to do it cheaper and smarter,“ said Charles R. Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company who has been following Dell since 1991. (He has also been reaping the financial rewards as a longtime Dell shareholder, seeing a 33-fold return on his investment.) “They’re truly in the 21st century when it comes to manufacturing.“
No other major computer maker produces computers in the United States. Long ago, Dell’s top rival, Hewlett-Packard, outsourced assembly of its PC’s to third parties, primarily based in Asia, as did I.B.M., the world’s third-largest PC maker. And I.B.M., which created the PC market in 1981, is leaving the business, announcing this month that it is selling its PC unit to Lenovo, the Chinese computer giant. “It’s been a long time since one of our competitors actually made a computer,“ said Michael S. Dell, the founder and chairman of the company that bears his name.
Dell, by contrast, operates three giant assembly plants in the United States - two in Austin and the third outside Nashville. Each is large enough to house six contiguous football fields. Last month, the company announced that it would build a fourth plant, twice as big as the others, near Winston-Salem, N.C. And, inside the company, executives talk about opening a fifth one, probably in Nevada, where it would build computers according to each customer’s specifications. At a White House conference on the economy on Wednesday, Kevin D. Rollins, Dell’s chief executive, boasted, not quite accurately, that all the computers the company sells domestically are made right here in the United States. “None is outsourced; none is made in other countries and shipped in,“ he said, though Dell laptops are in fact assembled overseas.
Dell’s decision to expand its American manufacturing presence, however, has nothing to do with patriotism. Executives here say their decisions are based on the bottom line as well as on geography; it is simply more efficient to stamp out computer equipment closer to the customer. “The reason we continue to manufacture in the United States is that it’s the optimal place to do so, and we can do it most cost effectively,“ said John Hamlin, who oversees Dell’s entire consumer line.
Few rivals know that better than Lenovo itself. The questions that many analysts have been asking in the wake of the I.B.M. deal is how well Lenovo, based in Beijing, can compete with Dell outside China, given how cheaply Dell can make its machines.
Dell has run a factory in Xiamen, China, since 1998 - but that’s to produce computer equipment that the company sells to its Asian customers. Similarly, Dell’s factory in Limerick, Ireland, makes machines for Europe. This month, Mr. Dell announced that his company would probably build a second European plant sometime soon.
Dell is also bucking global trends on another front. In an era when a call center is more likely to be in India than Indiana, the company has announced that it is building a new customer assistance facility in Oklahoma City. Earlier this year, it opened a call center in Edmonton, Alberta. And while Dell’s laptops are produced in Malaysia, they are built by Dell employees working inside a Dell-owned factory.
“I tell employees all the time that we’re in a race on costs,“ said Dick Hunter, who, as the Dell executive who oversees manufacturing in the United States, is Mr. Myhand’s boss. “When we lose the race on costs to Asia or wherever, that puts our own security in jeopardy.“
EVER since 1984, when Michael Dell began selling personal computers from his University of Texas dorm room, his company has been able to sell cheaper PC’s by cutting out the middleman, selling directly via the phone or, nowadays, the Internet. But the reason Dell continues to dominate as a low-cost leader - whether selling a PC, a server or, more recently, plasma televisions and portable music players - is its fanatical determination to save every penny it can. Mr. Dell may not quite be the Henry Ford of our time, but his company is certainly the Wal-Mart of the high-technology industry, for better or worse.
Who’s Afraid of China?
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“I set irrational goals, Michael and I together, to encourage our team so they don’t think of conventional solutions,“ Mr. Rollins said in an interview. “If we asked for a 10 or 15 percent increase in productivity, we’d get conventional solutions. But if we ask them to double their productivity, then they have to rethink everything.“
This year, their goal was a 30 percent increase in the number of machines that the company’s factories spit out - a target that Mr. Myhand says he is confident they will hit. Among the recent changes was a rerouting of cable so that it no longer had to be laced over and under other parts, and the decision to replace L-shaped tables with a single workbench, to avoid time-consuming twists. A decision was also made to apply one fewer sticker per machine. “We’re going to get there by saving four seconds here, and four seconds there,“ Mr. Myhand said. The labor costs of a PC are “roughly 10 bucks,“ Mr. Rollins said, meaning that payroll costs account for maybe 2 percent of the overall cost of the typical Dell PC. Five years ago, it took two workers 14 minutes to build a PC; it now takes a single worker roughly five minutes to do the same.
NOT surprisingly, the Dell factory is a place of reverence for those who take philosophical pleasure in the elimination of wasted movements, or at least the extraneous movements of others. “Shock and awe“ is the way Mr. Wolf of Needham & Company described the sensation he felt after visiting the flagship Austin plant; Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata, a research firm in Nashua, N.H., called Dell “remarkable.“ Fast Company might have trumped them all when the magazine labeled Dell “one of the fastest, most hyperefficient organizations on the planet.“
In 2000, when the company’s flagship plant opened, no structure in it was more than maybe 10 feet high. Four years later, the plant is now laced with triple-decker conveyor belts that rise as much as 40 feet above the factory floor. Black bins filled with parts are dispatched via these belts and then lowered mechanically to any one of the hundreds of employees who assemble the machines according to each customer’s specifications. The completed machines are then transported by conveyor belt to a shipping area, where they are boxed - largely by robots, which were installed only recently - and routed to dozens of idling big trucks. Typically, the trucks drive away with full loads 30 minutes after they arrive.
A dozen years ago, Dell stored roughly 30 days of inventory - the outer casings, motherboards, Intel chips and other components needed to feed the beast - in warehouses around the Austin area. The company, based just north of Austin in Round Rock, Tex., no longer operates any warehouses; instead, it requires suppliers to stock 8 to 10 days’ worth of goods no further than 90 minutes from its assembly plants. Its de facto warehouse, therefore, is the lineup of semi-trailers parked in the 48 truck bays that line one wall of its plant. “If a truck is four minutes late,“ Mr. Myhand said, “I have an entire line standing and waiting.“
Technically, Dell does not take possession of a part until it is wheeled off a truck and into its factory, and yet that same part will be a component of a complete machine within a couple of hours. A minimum of inventory translates into huge savings on Dell’s books, and it also means that when the company switches, say, to standard 40-gigabyte hard drives, it doesn’t have to blow through weeks of outmoded 20-gig drives.
All of that places a huge burden on Dell’s suppliers, each of which Dell rates weekly for performance. “To many suppliers, Dell is like having Wal-Mart for a client,“ said Mr. Eunice of Illuminata. “You love the volume, but not the constant grinding pressure on price, terms, conditions and timing.“
Dell executives say they have close working relationships with all their suppliers. The company says it helps them keep pace, if for no other reason than the more efficient a supplier, the better the price it can offer.
One executive at a Dell supplier, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity (“Dell is too critical to our business“), said: “They’re constantly reminding you about competitors. It’s mostly a strategic card, but it also makes sense. It’s the same as what Wal-Mart does. You say you want to sell pillows? So sell them to us for 10 cents apiece because otherwise I have all these people who’ll sell them to me for 15 cents.“
Who’s Afraid of China?
Who’s Afraid of China?
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Not everyone, of course, is in awe of Dell. Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, which competes with Dell among corporate customers, dismisses the company as a “grocery store“ rather than a technology innovator - an accusation repeated by Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive, Carleton S. Fiorina. Mr. Eunice is inclined to render a more mixed verdict, slapping on Dell a phrase - “virtuoso vanilla“ - that is at once a compliment and a dig.
Dell, Mr. Eunice said, performs “brilliantly“ when stamping out commodity products like laptops, desktop computers and printers. But he has been much less impressed when Dell “ventures into territory that requires new invention or significant investment in research and development.“
As an example, he points to a fast-growing category of computers called “blade servers,“ lower-cost machines that companies increasingly use to run their data centers and Web sites. “When Dell’s blade servers weren’t overheating, they still weren’t very good,“ Mr. Eunice said. “Competitors like I.B.M. and H-P that are more innovation-focused have done significantly better there - both in terms of product design and in terms of market share.“
FAR more impressive has been Dell’s entry into the printer business. It has been selling Dell-brand ink-jet and laser printers for just 19 months, and has only recently broadened its stable to include the range of offerings that corporate customers demand. But through the first nine months of this year, Dell has already captured a 13 percent share of new ink-jet printer sales, a category dominated by Hewlett-Packard, according to IDC, a research firm.
“Dell is going to let H-P and others break their toenails first to see exactly how the market works,“ said Roger Kay, an analyst at IDC, “And then they move in. And once they ramp up the machine, it’s ’watch out market,’ because profit margins drop, and Dell ends up taking half of it.“
In October, Dell aggressively jumped into the plasma television market with a 42-inch high-definition version that it sells for roughly $2,000 less than the competition’s. “We like to go after areas where we see high profit pools, and figure out how to save customers money while still remaining profitable,“ said Gerry Parrish Smith, the Dell executive responsible for the company’s line of television products.
Research and development is one way Dell tamps down costs. The company devotes 2 percent of its bottom line to this area, much less than its rivals. Innovation inside Dell is instead more about how one produces, packages and markets a product than it is about improvements in the product itself. “We have some competitors who are spending 5 or 6 or 8 percent on R&D,“ Mr. Rollins said, “but our financials suggest our R&D model is the right model.“
Others, however, wonder if those cost savings come with a long-term cost. According to the Dell supplier quoted anonymously above, when Dell squeezes the profit out of a market it also squeezes out everyone’s ability to innovate in any meaningful way.
There is also the long-term impact of Dell’s ability to keep increasing “units per labor hour,“ a favorite measurement inside the company. People may marvel over Dell’s manufacturing prowess, but the company is proving so efficient that it expects to employ only 1,500 people at its new North Carolina plant when it is fully operating.
And Dell’s commitment to keep jobs in the United States has its limits. To produce most of the new products the company has started to sell in recent years, from televisions and music players to electronics organizers and printers, Dell has turned to third-party manufacturers, primarily overseas. “We seek the most cost-effective place to manufacture so we can pass along the savings to our customers,“ said Mr. Hamlin, the Dell executive, sounding very much like those at other companies who explain their outsourcing and offshoring strategies.
EVEN so, computer equipment accounts for the bulk of Dell’s revenues, and it is still produced by Dell workers inside Dell factories. That is why companies continue to beat a path to Dell’s door to study from the wizards of efficiency.
“We have hundreds of companies come through here each year to learn from us,“ said Dick Hunter, Dell’s manufacturing chief. Last year, he said, the company gave 2,000 tours to 10,000 customers, including a team from General Motors that included G.M.’s president for North America, Gary L. Cowger.
“He brought his whole staff down here around a year ago, people from manufacturing, engineering, production, and they pumped us with questions over the course of a very long day, for 12 or 15 hours, about how we do things,“ Mr. Hunter said.
Mark R. Anderson, a longtime friend of Mr. Dell’s who is also the publisher of The Strategic News Service, a weekly digest for the computer and communications industries, said he believes that nearly every company could benefit by studying Dell. “No one does it as well as Dell, but even those companies that try and fail still succeed,“ he said. “Car companies, TV companies, whoever: they’re able to wring out costs by studying under Professor Dell. And they’re all that much more efficient by studying with the master.“
Dell的产品是没什么技术含量的.它只是生产和销售的明星.(请看转贴文章)
2004年12月25日 | 原始出处：名都新闻 【原文地址】
【内容提要】《纽约时报》网站在显著位置刊登了一篇介绍Dell的报道，但配上了一个非常刺眼的标题“Who’s Afraid of China?”，这里说的China显然是指中国的PC制造业，这个标题的主要原因的估计是Lenovo收购了IBM PC，对Dell的市场形成了新的压力，因此需要好好为“同胞”打打气。
今天的《纽约时报》网站在显著位置刊登了一篇介绍Dell的报道，但配上了一个非常刺眼的标题“Who’s Afraid of China?”，这里说的China显然是指中国的PC制造业，这个标题的主要原因的估计是Lenovo收购了IBM PC，对Dell的市场形成了新的压力，因为报道的篇幅太长，分为三个部分，这里只摘选其中的要点和细节之处，如有翻译\IT业的概念错漏之处，欢迎诸位指正，但不要拍砖哈:-）
谁会惧怕中国？
来到Dell的装配厂参观，31岁，具有军人气质的Mr. Myhand用同样的方式向每一批客人介绍，在1991年的最后三个月，Dell卖出了49,269台PC，工人们经常顾不上吃午饭，圣诞节前，订单在早上9点就堆积在工厂的地板上，直到下午1点运货卡车离开之前不断地有新订单送过来。
作为世界最大的PC制造商。Alfred Kinsey和他的研究小组用录像监控方式监视工人的操作，留心每一个多余的弯曲和（拧螺丝的）旋转，Dell的设计师们像玩一种high-fives的游戏一样节省任何一个不必要的螺丝，这样当气动的机械改锥在男女员工的头上摆动时，每出产一台PC会因为减少一个螺丝而少用4秒钟。所以，每当Dell向大客户出售产品时，都许诺产品是经过熟练的机师制造，并可以提供装配现场的录像，当然这也就泄漏了一些Dell工场的细节。
当中国被成为世界的加工厂时，Dell对此不以为然。Charles R. Wolf, 一名Needham & Company 公司的分析员说：“Dell并不是否定这种趋势，而是帮助PC生产制定标准，告诉人们如何工作得更精确和更聪明，Dell是20年来最精明的PC制造企业。”此人自从1991年入股Dell，现在他的投资价值已经翻了33倍。
Dell的主要对手惠普采取的是第三方制造的策略， IBM则把PC的主要生产中心放在亚洲，最近，IBM放弃了PC生产，将这项业务卖给中国的制造商Lenovo。Michael S. Dell说,他的对手一直是这样制造PC的。而Dell在美国有三个大装配厂，两个在Austin，另一个在Nashville.每个工厂的面积都相当于 6个足球场；Dell正在北卡罗莱纳的Winston-Salem,建第四个工厂，面积是以前工厂的两倍，而且正在酝酿在内华达建第五个。 Dell的CEO，Kevin D. Rollins说,美国人用的 Dell都是在本土制造。但实际上Dell的笔记本是海外制造的。
Dell这么做当然不是出于爱国，而是觉得在美国生产PC更贴近本土的消费市场。分析家们认为，Lenovo在购入IBM PC后将有能力在美国之外的市场提供价格更便宜的PC，而Dell在美国境外的制造力有限。1998年，Dell在厦门建起了装配厂，在爱尔兰也有一个， Mr. Dell 说正在考虑在欧洲建第二个厂。笔记本产品则是在马来西亚的一家Dell所有的工厂里制造。“我时刻告诉雇员们，我们正在进行成本的竞赛，一旦丢失了亚洲或者其它任何地方的市场，我们的饭碗就悬了。”Dick Hunter,一名Dell的高管说。
1984年,Michael Dell在德克萨斯大学的宿舍里出售攒机的PC，因为不需要经过中间商，价格会便宜，当时多是电话订购，现在这种直销的模式被搬到了网上，无论是台式机，笔记本，等离子电视还是MP3播放器都这样订货。尽可能减少中间环节的成本，确切地说，Mr. Dell也许还算不上这个时代的Henry Ford（福特汽车的创始人），但他的公司无疑是高新技术产业的Wal-Mart，或者差不多。
“多年来Michael和我一起，鼓励团队不考虑常规的目标。” Mr. Rollins在一次采访中说：“如果我们要求增加10%到15%的产量，我们会有常规的解决方案，但如果要求产量加倍，他们就不得不考虑每个细节。”
Dell今年的目标是产量增加30%，Mr. Myhand说对此很有信心，最近的改动包括取消机箱内电缆的盘绕，用直排的工作台代替 L形的工作台，减少工人走动时因为迂回而损耗的时间，并减少每台PC的贴标。“我们总是想办法在这里减少4秒，在那里减少4秒”，装配一台PC大约10道工序，由于提高装配速度，工人的成本减少到只占Dell的PC成本的大约2%，5年前装配一台PC需要2个人用14分钟，现在只需1个工人用5分钟。
2000年，当Dell的旗舰装配厂在Austin开张时，没有设备高于10英尺，现在则是用40英尺高的三层传送带装运产品和配件，用机械手自动装箱，运货的卡车一般在到达后30分钟内满载货物离去。若干年前，Dell大约需要30天的库存周期，但现在位于德克萨斯州Austin的北部Round Rock的工厂则没有仓库，取而代之的是要求配件商提供8 到 10天的零件库存，并要求能在 90内送到Dell的工厂,为此Dell的工厂准备了48个卡车车位的停车场。对于少量的库存配件，Dell也精打细算，从不积压过时的产品，比如说当 40G的硬盘是主流配件时，库存里绝没有20G的硬盘。
批量采购和压价是Dell必然采用的手段，Dell的高管说他们与许多供应商保持密切联系，Dell于供应商是互利关系。其中有的供应商要求Dell不要对外透露其公司的名字，就像 Wal-Mart的做法，如果别人知道了竞争者的名字，就会进一步压价：你想卖枕头，只能卖10美分一个，因为有XXX这些公司可以提供15 美分的产品。
并不是每个人都说Dell的好话，Scott McNealy,Sun Microsystems（太阳微系统公司）的CEO参观后说，Dell算不上一家高新技术企业，像是个杂货店。惠普的总裁Carleton S. Fiorina也持同样观点。
但是Dell有攻占市场，争夺客户的策略，一种名为blade servers的服务器虽然技术含量不及IBM和惠普的产品，但在市场上逐渐增加销量。在打印机市场，Dell做了19个月，已经占据了喷墨打印机市场份额的13%。Roger Kay, 一位IDC的分析员说，Dell一开始总是像拾IBM和惠普的牙慧，但逐渐占据上风，因为总体的价格在下降，Dell的低成本使其产品具有更多的价格承受力。10月起，Dell开始出售价格低于 $2,000的等离子电视， Gerry Parrish Smith, Dell的一名高管说：“我们正在寻求其它能带来利润的领域。”
研发资金只占Dell支出的2%，而Dell的竞争对手通常会投入5%至8%，一家匿名的供应商说，Dell在价格上压榨市场的利润，同时也压制了每个配件供应商的创新能力。Dell的研发成本多用于提高工人的生产效率，也就是单位时间内的工作量。外人通常惊异于Dell的生产能力，当然Dell的生产仅限于PC，打印机、等离子电视和MP3播放器都是第三方代工。
Dick Hunter, Dell的制造主管说，每年都有数百家公司到Dell观摩，去年接待了 2,000 次，大约10,000名客人，包括General Motors（通用汽车）的北美区总裁Gary L. Cowger.
Mark R. Anderson, 一位Mr. Dell的老朋友说，没有人做的像Dell一样好，他把Dell成为管理界的“教授”和“大师”。
两个感想：
1， Dell的工厂让人联想起了卓别林的《摩登时代》
2， 敢情德州还有比小布什更BT的人
《纽约时报》的原文
Tags: DELL电子产品技术含量