Product design for supply chain : quantifying the costs of complexity in Hewlett-Packard's retail desktop PC business

Over the past several years, Hewlett-Packard Company's North America Consumer Computing (NACC) division has faced pressures to increase retail product variety in response to growing customer demand. As they pursue incremental revenue and market share to meet corporate milestones, their, product portfolio grows and the overall complexity of the business increases. The holistic effects of this complexity across the supply chain are not fully understood, which can lead to inefficiencies in portfolio management and, ultimately, lower profitability for the division. Faced with this growing problem, the NACC division employed an HP internal consulting group to help quantify the costs and benefits of complexity in their business and to help establish decision-making guidelines to optimize future product cycles. This project involved three main phases: identification of complexity cost drivers in the retail consumer PC business, development of a quantitative model to calculate complexity effects, and suggestion of complexity guidelines for future portfolio planning. Each phase included presentations to senior management and NACC staff as a way to build "complexity consciousness" throughout the organization.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Raphel, Aaron Matthew

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sara Beckman and Thomas Roemer.

• Materials Science and Engineering.
• Sloan School of Management.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34831

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34831