“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.
Necessity is the mother of invention and because Dell and other companies such as Wal-mart want to stay in business and remain profitable, they must continually adapt their business model to maximize efficiency and minimize waste.
