Who's afraid of China?

By Gary Rivlin
The New York Times
 

AUSTIN, Texas--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, 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 PCs 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."

Staying or going?
No other major computer maker produces computers in the United States. Long ago, Dell's top rival, Hewlett-Packard, outsourced assembly of its PCs to third parties, primarily based in Asia, as did IBM, the world's third-largest PC maker. And IBM, 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 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 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 IBM 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, 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 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 PCs 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. 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.

"I set irrational goals, Michael and I together, to encourage our team so they don't think of conventional solutions," 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 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," Myhand said. The labor costs of a PC are "roughly $10," 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 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, Texas, 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," 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 40GB hard drives, it doesn't have to blow through weeks of outmoded 20GB 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 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."

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. 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, 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," Eunice said. "Competitors like IBM and HP that are more innovation-focused have done significantly better there--both in terms of product design and in terms of market share."

Printer success
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 HP 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," 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 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 GM'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," Hunter said.

Mark R. Anderson, a longtime friend of 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."

 

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