HP’s Supply Chain Transformation Challenge

As the world’s largest technology company, HP operates the most complex IT supply chain in the world—delivering notebooks, PCs, and printers as well as large servers and room-filling web-press printing systems, and their associated parts.

Building on a long tradition of supply chain innovation, HP in 2010 saw opportunities to further leverage its scale and launched a company-wide transformation program targeting substantial supply chain improvements in procurement, processes and IT, warranty and services, and network and logistics.

Jozo Acksteiner, Manager of Strategy and Analytics, Strategic Planning and Modeling Group (SPaM) at HP and Claudia Trautmann, Program Manager for Global Supply Chain Network & Logistics Strategy at HP, were part of the program management teams accountable for delivering the challenging multi-billion year-to-year savings and structural improvements to HP’s physical supply chain network.

With a total timeline of merely two years, the program teams faced significant challenges, including:

• Launching supply chain analysis projects to create excellent solutions fast.
• Delivering close-to-optimal results in imperfect data situations.
• Overcoming local optimization within the businesses towards a converged cross-HP supply chain that aligned solutions across business groups.
• Gaining full buy-in from operational managers in order to implement solutions quickly.
• Coping with a mature and complex supply chain grown both organically and through acquisition.

In order to effectively meet these challenges, HP developed new approaches that enhanced its existing analysis and optimization portfolio for supply chain improvement.

Read the article How HP Visualizes its Supply Chain using Geographic Analytics