Next Step: Remove All Human Intervention

InternetWeek: Where do you see opportunities for the Internet to re-engineer your business?

Owen: On every level. There are opportunities at the sales force level. There are opportunities for service, cost and productivity. We can cut out a lot of cycle time in our process of taking, building and fulfilling orders by getting streamlined using e-commerce.

DELL

Projected 1999 figures Web Sales: $11 billion (40 percent of all sales) Site Visits: 100 million Personalized Customer Sites (premier pages): 30,000 Order status inquiries: 2.6 million

InternetWeek: How do you see the Net working for your sales force?

Owen: Predominantly, it relieves the sales force of many basic duties. A salesperson is not selling 100 percent of the time. They spend a lot of their time just handling order-processing issues, making sure the order is correct and in the system, and handling routine inquiries. In the future, the sales force will be predominantly spending their time actually selling to customers, because the Web will enable much of the basic processing. Large-scale business-to-business customers will integrate their purchasing and ERP systems with our systems, so it will be completely computer-to-computer.

InternetWeek: How do Premier Pages fit in with Dell's overall strategy?

Other Movers And Shakers Transformation Of The Enterprise Home Page

Owen: Premier Pages present the business customer with a password-protected view of the specific pricing they negotiated with us and the status of their orders. It's a personalized view for the business customer into the Dell Web site.

There are 30,000 different implementations. Some customers have multiple pages because they are large businesses, so there are probably 25,000 customers.

Think of Premier Pages as being in the middle between the public Web site and the truly integrated ERP solution. The large customers will primarily use the truly integrated ERP solution, using Premier Pages primarily for information. Midsize and small businesses won't have elaborate electronic hookups and ERP systems, so they'll use Premier Pages as one of their predominant methods. And the public Web site is basically for people who are not repeat business customers.

InternetWeek: How does the Internet assist Dell in delivering service?

Owen: We are getting our technical support reps equally focused on populating the online databases with answers as they are in answering the phone calls. The future is getting information to customers through databases rather than through the phone.

We might not need to hire as many people in the future if we are able to deflect the calls. Service calls are a significant part of our business. Some 80 percent of service phone calls that we receive can be resolved without actually having to go and repair the machine. It's a software problem, essentially, and those can be handled over the Web, where the incremental cost to Dell is essentially nothing, just a few cents.

The next generation of technologies will focus on self-healing machines. The Web server will look into the client and say, "You know, I can spot some problems. There's a device driver conflict. Would you like me to fix them automatically?" And the customers can reply yes, maybe even before they realize they have a problem.

InternetWeek: How does the Internet help shorten cycle time?

Owen: If you think about a customer calling to place an order with us today, maybe we'll quote four days delivery. In practice, it takes us only a matter of hours to actually build the computer. What takes the time? The salespeople eventually get around to retrieving a faxed purchase order from a pile of faxes. They take a look at it. It's got an error. They call the customer back. They can't find the customer. They pull it back and forth.

Now picture an integrated e-commerce world, where essentially the customer pushes a button, or the customer's ERP system automatically creates an order. It is by definition correct. The order can't be technically incorrect because the systems are talking to each other--there's no human element. The order goes straight down to the production line and, potentially 20 seconds later, the machine starts getting built, so you've eliminated a terrific amount of cycle time.

On the back end of that, the moment the machine is finished being built, it gets shipped to the customer. The invoices get electronically transmitted right back into the customer's system, so the credit collection period starts immediately. The only limit is how long it takes to physically build the machine. If it takes eight to 10 hours, that would be the limit.