Dell Has ‘The World’s Best Supply Chain,’ Top Execs Say

Dell Technologies’ top executives say the company navigated the ongoing supply chain shortages thanks to some of the best talent and technology partnerships in the industry.

Dell Technologies’ top executives touted the $101 billion PC and infrastructure giant’s supply chain capabilities and ability to accurately tell Dell partners what’s in stock and when it could be delivered, which has become a “durable competitive advantage.”

“We have undeniably the world’s best supply chain organization and leadership in the industry,” said Chuck Whitten, co-chief operating officer at Dell, during a session at Dell Technologies World this week. “The last couple of years, it’s also been the combination of that with our product teams being able to qualify what was available so that we can meet customer needs.”

Whitten (pictured above) said Dell is providing clear signals for customers and partners of its supply chain availability. “Meaning if a customer asked us for a specific spec. We say, ‘That’s not available. Here is what is available.’ That is a real advantage,” he said.

[Related: Michael Dell On ‘Embracing Developers’ And Multi-Cloud Future]

Megan Amdahl, senior vice president of Partner Management and Enterprise Sales, for Insight, one of Dell’s largest global partners, said the industry-wide struggles with hardware procurement, pricing, and giving partners notice when items were not available, gives Dell partners a distinct advantage.

“Dell has just consistently stood out through the pandemic with much stronger and quicker lead times across their broad portfolio,” she said. “But also, when they give an estimated ship date to the clients, they pretty consistently hit it. So that’s something Dell is going to be remembered for a lot of years. There’s something to be said about such a strong reliability in the supply chain and you know that took a ton of work on their behalf to be so well positioned for it.”

Michael Dell: ‘Supplier Partners Think Of Us As A Permanent Customer’

Whitten along with CEO Michael Dell and Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and co-chief operating officer at Dell Technologies, touted the company’s supply chain during a session at Dell Technologies World 2022 today in Las Vegas.

As the global COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe causing major supply chain issues for nearly the entire IT industry, Dell stood ahead of the pack due to its tight and longstanding partnerships.

CEO and founder Michael Dell said one reason the Round Rock, Texas-based company has been able to better navigate parts constraints, are the long business relationships it has with component makers.

“Our scale and relationships have been there for decades,” Michael Dell said. “In many cases, these supplier partners think of us as a permanent customer because we’ve been there for a long time. You think about the edge and it’s kind of an interesting use case for the future. All of the public clouds together have 600 data centers. There are 7 million cellular base systems in the world. Every single one of those is in the process of becoming a multi-access edge computing data center.”

Clarke, who led Dell’s effort to ensure the company’s supply chain didn’t collapse over the previous 26 months, said the next sourcing challenge comes as the company begins to push CPUs and storage out to the edge of the network.

“The edge is about getting computational resources, CPUs, and storage out to the edge of the network or at the base of all these cell towers. That’s a supply chain scale, and service scale issue. I like our chances when that happens. I think we can do that better than anybody.”

Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas runs from May 2 to May 5. Here is CRN’s full coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022.