How Dell Does IT
When the computer company moved one of its critical supply chains from a legacy UNIX system to industry-standard technology and Oracle Database 10g, it boosted performance and cut $5 million out of IT costs.
The right IT platform helps Dell manufacturing facilities like the one above stay up and running and turning out some 100,000 systems a day.

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t Dell, fast, flexible, and lean supply chains lie at the heart of the business. Indeed, Dell’s supply chain capabilities are a key competitive differentiator for the company—one that enables Dell to deliver built-to-order computers to customers quickly and cost-effectively. And that means that when it comes to the information systems that support that supply chain, there is little room for error. “If these systems are not

operational, we don’t build and ship products. If we don’t do that, we don’t book revenue— which makes these systems mission-critical,” says Duane Miller, senior manager of Worldwide Procurement IT at Dell. Not long ago, however, Dell’s IT professionals saw potential problems looming on the horizon. The database that was the foundation of its supply chain applications was running on a legacy UNIX

system—and with the ongoing success of Dell products and the resulting IT workloads, that system was reaching the limits of its capacity. “We were starting to get ‘Sev 1’ calls regularly,” says Miller. Such calls, he explains, occur when an outage in the supply chain management system interrupts production. “They are the highest level of severity in terms of problem calls, based on the degree of impact to the business. With those calls, it’s all hands on deck, and we drop everything and get them back up and

operational, because the problem is stopping manufacturing at one of our domestic or international facilities.” What’s more, the IT group could see that things weren’t going to be getting any easier. The demand for Dell’s products was increasing, and forecasts called for