The DOBlog

Tag: Dell Quality

  • Oh D(h)ell… an update

    Dell Technician came to my office today. This was after a techie had called to my home last Thursday. When I was in London presenting at an Information Quality conference (does 2 speaking slots count as a keynote?).

    The fact that I was going to be away had been clearly communicated to Dell’s support people on Tuesday of last week. But a technician called to my (empty) home all the same. Even if my cat had been inclined to let him in (for only the cat was in residence), the laptop was with me because my presentations were on it.

    So a technician called to me today. He rang me and (shock) double checked where he was to go (my home or my office). Luckily I had beene expecting him and had the graphics card with me.

    So at this count, the cost to Dell of finishing (please note FINISHING, not FIXING) my laptop is at least the cost of 2 technician call outs and the cost of a graphics card. I gave Seamus (for that was his name) the 128MB card to take away as in my office, like many others, there is a resident technology guru/’liberator’ who would gladly have taken it home to put in an old machine of his. That has saved Dell a few euros.

    I will be packaging up the Desktop card and posting it to Dell at the weekend – increasing the cost to me of this laptop by the cost of that postage. However it is the honest and ethical thing to do, particularly as they have not given me any indication as to what the process is for returning things they sent me in error.

    What else would I do with a desktop graphics card in a house where my wife and I both have laptops?

    What else indeed?

    And I’ve also sorted out my DVD drive issues (on my own). As I had diagnosed back in the beginning, the culprit was the Roxio driver that Windows Vista was surpressing due to incompatibility. I uninstalled all of Roxio (for now) and everything worked fine again. I found on the Roxio site’s discussion forum that the real culprit is the Roxio “drag to CD” utility.

  • Oh (d)Hell, here we go again…

    So, prompt and efficient, Dell Post-Sales Customer Support shipped me the graphics card for my laptop -the one they should have put in while it was still in the factory. It arrived this morning at 11:00am as promised. It was shipped from their factory in Limerick – a city and County I know well. About 20 minutes before the courier arrived I’d had a call from my support team contact in Dell to set up the technician appointment to come out and finish building my laptop.

    The sun was shining. My dentist hadn’t come over all Marathon Man on me. I am starting a short holiday with my wife… all was well with the world.

    Until I opened the package. To find that it included a graphics card, which I assume is a 256MB card. So far so good…

    … it is a card for a Desktop machine not a laptop. It will not fit the computer I have. It is as useful to me as a chocolate fireguard, an ice teapot or a kosher sausage roll. I expect a technician to call me soon to confirm their appointment. I will only be able to confirm my disappointment.

    So what information might Dell in Limerick have had available to them to ship the correct thing?

    1. They might have had the asset tag of the laptop, from which the model and configuration details could be determined.
    2. They should have had the model of the laptop
    3. Perhaps they had details of the complaint, including the original order number and my customer number

    Any of those items of data would have enabled someone picking the components out of the storage bin to say “We want a graphics card (check) for an Inspiron Laptop (oh… wrong thing)”.

    If that information was not available to the people in Limerick, then it is inevitable that a mix up would happen. In this Information Age almost all processes that we run in business or that we encounter in life require complete, consistent, accurate and timely information to run as we expect. At assembly, there was information available that my laptop should have had 256MB video RAM. The quality failure in that instance was that that information was not referred to to make sure that the real world thing that it described met that expectation.

    Once the support people understood the problem, a graphics card was dispatched to fix the issue. However, due either to unavailable information (did the request to ship the replacement card specify the model of the card and that it was for a laptop?) inaccurate or inconsistent information (does the pick-list master data show that the desktop card I’ve received is the correct card for my laptop?), or inaccurate interpretation of the information, I wound up with the wrong card – a solution to my problem that does not solve the problem.

    This is a significant cost issue for Dell. It has to be. So far, to get my laptop to the specification I actually ordered it, they’ve incurred the cost of an additional graphics card (estimate €100) plus the cost of the courier (estimate €30 for overnight delivery) plus the cost of the support call center person (estimate €10 so far) plus the cost of the technician (estimate €120 based on ex-warranty call out charges) and so far it has cost Dell an additional €260 (my estimate) to perpetuate a screw up. If Dell can ship me the correct graphics card before the technician arrives then their cost will only be around €390.

    To put that in perspective… that is 25.2% of the cost of the laptop I purchased so unless Dell are operating at 30% margins on their business (in which case they have some leg room their competitors don’t or their machines are over-priced) they have lost money on my purchase. A fortnight in and already I’m a below-zero customer in terms of my lifetime value to Dell (and that’s before you factor in that I might not buy another Dell given the difficulties I’m having).

    Even with the cost of finance over 3 years to me (god bless the never-never finance), Dell are just about breaking even on me as a customer. Based on my estimates of course. And assuming they get it right before the technician arrives to try and fit a square peg (desktop graphics card) in a round hole (laptop). If Dell’s costs for hardware are 50% of retail, they are still looking at around 20% ‘evaporation’ of their margins… that is an unsustainable business overhead that seems to be accepted as the ‘cost of doing business’.

    Assuming Dell shipped 1000 laptops last week and 10% of them were mis-assembled and have had similar issues with replacement components, Dell could be burning 100 X €390 = €39,000 a week in avoidable scrap and rework. That equates, in my industry, to around 40 to 45 full-time-equivalent staff in ‘clerical’ roles. The cost of non-quality is easy to measure. That’s a direct cost to the Business that is avoidable. It’s just harder to measure than headcount and not as easy to cut. You can’t fire your data.

    The root cause of all of this cost is the quality of information and the quality of the culture in which that information is used… if the metric for assembly teams is how fast something is shipped versus how quickly the right thing is shipped then corners will get cut at 16:45 on a Friday to get that product boxed and out to shipping before the shift ends. If the customer complaint follow ups don’t have sufficient information about the product that is being complained about then screw ups are perpetuated.

    Dell are feeling the analysts pinch on the short term numbers (quarter on quarter growth and profits). In my opinion, it is time to bite the bullet and look at the root causes of their information supply chain problems before they cut head count – because who knows what other information ills headcount might be masking. They need to build quality in, both in terms of the product and in terms of their information management. They need to do it now. Cutting headcount will fix the bottom line. For now. Fixing these fundamentals fixes the bottom line for ever – while increasing efficiency and (perhaps) avoiding the need to prune back headcount as aggressively as currently forecast.

    The management approaches needed aren’t rocket science and they aren’t an unproven quantity. Neither is the failure of a business because it costs them their profit margin to inspect defects out of a product after it has shipped. Hopefully some Dell manager will happen across this blog post and might put the simple Excel spreadsheet together that shows the true cost to Dell of non-quality information and poor management of information. Perhaps that might prompt some thinking about how best to meet market analyst expectations in a sustainable way.

    Failing that, Dell will inevitably enter a head-count reduction death-spiral of managing by the easy numbers which is difficult – if not impossible – to pull out of.

  • Dell and their cost base

    Some jitters amongst the Celtic Tiger cubs this week as a number of hi-tech firms trimmed back the tent a little here. In net terms, it is no real issue as there is a skills shortage in the types of job that have been pruned.

    One organisation rumoured to be looking at pruning their Irish operations is Dell. As I type this I’ve been on the phone to Dell (both Tech support and Customer Service) for 90 minutes.

    Dell Tech Support (hi Lucy – if you are reading this) were brilliant. Issue couldn’t be resolved without internet access or a boot CD (neither of which I remembered to pack this morning) but a call back for Wednesday has been arranged. I suspect that this call will happen as promised.

    Dell Customer Service was a different story. Transferred in from Tech support… explained issue (wrong graphics card installed in the laptop) for 10 minutes to be told that I need to contact Tech support. Explained that I had been transferred from there. Was told that I was through to the pre-sales/pre-delivery customer service team and I needed to get on to the post-deliver Customer service team. Nice Indian lady transferred me. Was on hold for 10 minutes. Call eventually answered… by the Indian lady who had originally transferred me. When I gave my customer reference number the call ‘mysteriously’ dropped.

    In fairness, I was phoned back a few minutes later with an apology for dropping the call and was transferred through to the right department – after another 15 minutes on hold. They dealt with my no-brain query very efficiently – new graphics card to be sent out to me, and could I install it myself? Could I b*ggery (despite my experience and qualifications in techie things the lawyer lizard hind brain told me that self-install was the path to invalid warranty). So a technician is being dispatched to install the card. Hopefully the technician will arrive after the card and before I toddle off on a long weekend break with the missus.

    So, here’s a suggestion for Michael Dell and his team to help address their cost issues and resource issues that analysts are pointing to:

    1. Build quality in. Make sure that products shipped match the order. That will reduce the instances of calls into Customer Service/Tech support. Have a QA checker check the order against the manfactured good to make sure that no errors exist. This avoids having the CUSTOMER do it for you when the product arrives and would reduce the number of calls to yoru Customer Support line.
    2. Break down barriers – why the (d)hell do you need two categories of Customer Service team? Wizard based work flow etc. would allow staff to be equally competent across both your presales and post sales Customer Service. This would reduce the numbers of staff you would need as your Call Centre could be truly blended.
    3. Invest in training. CSRs should never have to tell a customer that they “haven’t been trained in that”. Either through on-going training and/or wizard based Knowledge management the CSR should have the skill to address the issue
    4. Address Information qualtiy issues – my Dell order has TWO order numbers. This caused unnecessary confusion with the Customer Support people. It is probably the root cause for the error in the build.
    5. Analyse common causes of tech support or Customer Service calls. The impression I got today was that there are a lot of issues with Roxio Software running on Vista. Perhaps a test of software that will be bundled with laptops is in order so only software that works with the OS is shipped – again reducing likelihood of calls to Customer Support/Tech Support in the first month.

    Toyota is rapidly overtaking General Motors by following these type of quality principles. Far from being a fad, management of quality and management of information quality is just a bloody good way to run your business. While GM are shutting factories, Toyota are opening more.

    Go figure.

    Dell – don’t do the easy number cuts… tackle the real issues of quality.

    ####A slight aside###
    During the course of the call I was asked if I’d like to install the replacement graphics card myself. Here’s an idea for Dell. Sack your assembly people. All of them. Send the customer a box full of components and a nice user friendly assembly guide, like you get with furniture from Argos. That would reduce head-count and would put the onus for quality of assembly on the customer. Of course, it would induce people to go and buy Acer or Apple instead, but them’s the breaks.

  • Windows Vista and my new Dell – some thoughts

    Blogging this in some frustration.

    Ordered a new Dell a few weeks back because my previous “Aldi-Special” (a ‘Gericom’ brand) had died.

    As I was going to be sticking the new purchase on the never-never (finance) I decided to pimp my ride a bit and ordered the best spec I could get for the price I’d paid 2 years ago for the venerable Aldi-special. Ever the bastion of customer choice, Dell gave me the option to have either Windows Vista or Windows VISTA, depending on what typeface I preferred.

    Spec I ordered was 2.0ghz dual core centrino processor, 2ghz ram, 256mb graphics and a hard-drive the size of Wyoming. After some kerfuffle with Dell’s systems losing my order somewhere on its way to Finance, the paperwork was processed and the machine shipped.

    First problem – the courier who was delivering the goods point to point decided that, as I wasn’t in, he’d deliver the €1000+ of computer to a neighbour. I wouldn’t have minded that except I had specifically told him NOT to do that as I wanted to inspect the goods when they arrived so I could be sure that there was no problems or anything missing. Courier obviously felt that doing the job he was being paid to do (ensuring that the purchaser of the expensive things actually got them) was too much hassle and dumped them on a neighbour. I found out the next day (a Friday), when after sitting in for the morning I rang the courier to see when he would (as per my instructions) deliver the goods to me.

    Suffice it to say that I was unimpressed.

    Laptop seemed to be working fine for the first few days. Vista is beautiful to work with, in my opinion. But you do need the extra oomph of a good processor and ram and a top notch video card with a chunk of V-Ram (more on that in a mo). I used it last week for a presentation in Dublin – worked fine. Due to commuting it stayed home untouched for most of this week however.

    One thing however niggled almost from Day 1… Roxio software that Dell bundled with the laptop contain a driver (which I assume is a CD rom driver) that Vista blocks as it might make the machine unstable. No driver updates nor patches can be found, even though it seems that a similar driver issue affected Inspiron laptops under XP prior to Christmas.

    Another thing that niggles now is that there appears to be an on-board music critic who decided that my taste in blues/jazz/funk was not suited to this laptop and has managed to switch off the ability of the DVD drive to read any CD media – even the CDROM driver disk that came shipped with the laptop. This kicked in yesterday midway through a listen to a Jools Holland CD my wife got me for my birthday. Also spurned are The Blues Brothers (cheesy but good), Clapton, and Rory Gallagher.

    I decided to go on a trawl of the system to identify where the music critic resided. I uninstalled the DVD drive drivers and rebooted the system (to see if that would evict The Critic). No joy. As my machine rebooted for the second cycle of uninstall/reinstall I noticed that the BIOS was registering my Video RAM at 128MB… “hang on a minute”, said me as I reached for my copy of the order specification attached to my finance agreement, “I ordered 256MB Ram”.

    Now the installed video Ram is not easy to identify by a physical inspection of the machine. Indeed, unless you actually specifically go looking to find the details under the Display Settings of Vista then you’ll never know if you have 128MB or 256MB – not unless you notice a really severe hang on your machine. Certainly it is not something that the technically unaware would automatically think of checking straight away.

    Annnnnnyyyyyhhhhhooooooo…… now I had 3 issues with Dell.

    1. Roxio Drivers not working under Vista (as an Information Quality aside, the error message doesn’t refer to Roxio but to Sonic Systems, who it turns out own Roxio)
    2. DVD no readie de CD – (perhaps this is related to 1 above?)
    3. The sloppy f*ckers hadn’t built my machine to the spec I’d ordered and I probably would never have noticed if the other stuff hadn’t started going wrong

    So today (a Saturday) I tried to use Dell’s on-line Customer Service (because their Consumer Call centre doesn’t work Saturdays.. Why not?). Apparently Dell’s email process into Customer Service doesn’t work on Saturdays either. Nor does the email process to Technical support. Apparently their email system is unavailable. Also Dell’s support doesn’t have VISTA listed as an Operating System on their drop down list… so how do I get support for VISTA?

    Maybe they have a Literary Critic installed who has tired of reading cranky missives in poorly phrased English?

    To summarise:

    1. The Courier failed to meet expectation as he didn’t follow instructions and did not provide me with information as to what he had done with my goods. Given that the evidence of delivery is the signature he captured I could have been left in an awkward position. Couriers are used to ensure delivery to the correct address and person, particularly where the goods are valuable. Otherwise, we’d all just use the post, which is very reliable.
    2. Vista meets expectation – it looks good but has some issues. Hopefully these will shake out as the adoption rate increases
    3. Roxio’s software does not WORK under Vista. Dell should have tested it before bundling it and if there was an issue under XP they should have made sure a patch was available that works under VISTA (the XP patch can’t be installed as it doesn’t recognise Vista as an OS).
    4. The product delivered to me does not meet expectation – Dell’s post-build quality control obviously didn’t catch that the Graphics card installed is not the Graphics Card ordered. Why?

    Of course, I’d tell them that if their email systems were available.

    The brother bought a laptop in Lidl yesterday morning. It has exactly what was on the specification sheet. It differs only slightly in terms of RAM and CPU speed from mine. It was nearly half the price of mine (it uses an AMD processor, I have an Intel). The brother’s laptop has met, if not exceeded his expectations. I’m left fuming on a Saturday because mine falls short of my expectations.

    Lidl or Dell – who has better Quality when it comes to laptops?