Ebusiness Of Dell

Dell's B2C vs. B2B: Observation and Application

Introduction

Michael Dell, who is the founder and CEO of the computer titan Dell, started the firm in 1984. From this time, the firm has been deemed by many as a success because of a basic practice: "selling computer system directly to customers where Dell could best understand consumer needs and efficiently provide the most effective computing solutions to meet such necessities" (Dell, 2007). Accomplishing this task is possible from the use of just-in-time (JIT) inventory and establishing supply chains, or value chains, which are a grouping of companies "who are increasingly coordinating activities through an extranet" (LearnThat, 2007) to service the customer, business, or government with a high-quality or low-cost product upon delivery. The purpose of this paper is to examine and detail the value chains for the business-to-consumer (B2C) and the business-to-business (B2B) relationship and relate the said findings to class materials.

B2C

As a consumer, when visiting the Dell website and selecting the appropriate hypertext markup language, various products for consumer use are apparent, from monitors to central processing units to printers and ink supplies. In a mock search and to narrow a direct value chain for analysis, the authoress chose the Dell XPS 420 with monitor, built for performance and productivity. The basic specifications from the Dell sight (2007) "include an Intel Core 2 Q6600 Quad-Core processor, a Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium operating system, a 3 GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667 MHz - 4 DIMMS random access memory, the ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO video card, a 320GB2- 7200RPM/SATA 3.0 Gb/w-16MB Cache, a 20 inch Dell flat screen monitor, Adobe Elements Studio for this particular system, Trend Micro Internet Security, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, In-Home service warranty, financing available by CIT Bank to qualified applicants, and other niceties.

Such findings narrow the list of identifiable suppliers in the chain to Dell itself, ATI Radeon, Microsoft, both for the operating system and application software, Intel, Adobe, Trend Micro and CIT Bank. Shipping and In-Home service is available through various contractors. According to the Dell company website Question and Answer screen (2007), "more than one carrier is required to handle the tremendous daily shipping volume generated by Dell. Different carriers are also used by different warehouses and shipping locations in order to provide the most timely service to our customers." Similar exceptions are noted on other pages regarding the In-Home service warranty, which is provided by an available third-party affiliate, which can be considered a contractual part of the supply chain.

Curriculum Materials Relation

Schneider (2004, p. 5) classifies "a company which sells a finished good to a consumer through the World Wide Web" as B2C eCommerce. The supply chain for the chosen product is straight-forward and is based on need. These needs can be view by the supply chain through an extranet, allowing supplier to

"have access to a secure Website that shows Dell's latest sales forecasts, along with other information about planned product changes, defect rates and warranty claims...allowing all members of the value chain to reduce inventories, increase quality and provide high value to the final customer" (Schneider, 2004, p231).

This information in conjunction with JIT inventory management keeps costs low and revenue elevated for Dell, its supply chain and the final customer.

B2B

As a procurement specialist visiting the Dell website, in search of specific bulk product for a large corporation, one would select appropriate hypertext markup language of "Large Corporation" to view various products such as workstations, servers, monitors, and the like. In a mock search and to narrow a direct value chain for analysis, the authoress chose to view the Dell Precision 490, which is ideal for "financial services, product design, graphics compute clusters, and multi-tasking or multi-threaded space-constrained workstation environments" (Dell, 2007) such as those on a local area network (LAN).

The product options offered for this central processing unit are various and the preferred choices were the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, Microsoft Windows Vista Business, WD Raptor hard drive, McAfee Security Center, Sound Blaster Audigy sound card, NVIDIA Quatro FX 1600 M graphic card, Absolute Lease by Computrace, which