Dell Case Study

1. What has made Dell successful to date?

Many factors contributed to Dell’s success to date. One of the factors is the fact that the company is a mail order company. Many corporate companies like the fact that they were able to customize the pc to satisfy their needs. Not only was it convenient for businesses to customize their purchase but also dealing directly with the manufacturer guaranteed best pricing.

Despite its 5% loss when Dell tried to enter the channel market the company strive to have competitive prices to attract and retain customers. When Dell started to transition to workstations in 1996, everyone thought that the product was too complex for the dell’s direct model. In 1997 Dell introduced a Window’s product priced below anything else in the market and succeeded. Another success story of the company is when Dell entered the high-margin server market by offering a more powerful pro server at the price of a less powerful Pentium product. By 1999 Dell surfaced as the second-largest Wintel server in the United States and stole the first position from Compaq during the first quarter of 2001.

The key to Dell’s success is its direct model. Simple to describe but hard to reproduce, this model is about low cost, direct customer relationship and virtual integration. The direct model is customer friendly and provide very low cost to customers. The strategies that Michael Dell has in his business have contributed to the company’s success. Dell continues to grow and innovate with keeping the customer in mind and delivering superior customer value.

2. What is Dell’s position in the industry as of 2002?

As of 2002 Dell was a pioneer and became a leader in customer-direct and build to order computer system.In the 3rd quarter of 2002 Dell regained the position as the #1 PC manufacturer , as a principal supplier to corporate customers, government agencies and educational institutions. Dell accomplished this despite the fact that Hewlett-Packard merged...