Dell Part Routing Case Study and Implementation 08’

While at Dell, I was tasked with solving a complicated problem involving routing incoming parts from OEMs and various vendors to various Dell owned stock rooms. Like all manufacturing processes that deal specifically with inventory handling, there were a wide variety of issues that had to be analyzed and taken into consideration while architecting a software solution to resolve this business critical problem. I had to consider everything from the user interface, which had to allow a floor operator to scan parts very rapidly without every touching a mouse or keyboard, to the financial transactions that would account for the incoming and outgoing inventory.



After careful analysis of the problems at hand, I created a simple but focused user interface to give the operator not only the ability to scan and track the incoming parts, but also to see pertinent information about each part as it is scanned and it all had to happen within milliseconds. I was able to accomplish this by creating a series of customized .NET Server Controls that utilize Ajax technology. After doing a good bit of research and some performance bench marks on the available Ajax libraries, I finally settled on an open source Ajax library that I later modified to suite my own needs. The primary benefit of this ultra light weight Ajax library was that it allowed me to access the data I needed through my Web service layer at lightning speeds. This was a critical factor considering that operators using this UI would not have time to wait around for screens to change or servers to process requests. I even created the custom icons that help the operator quickly determine if parts have been received, or committed to a local inventory route.



I added many features that created additional backend logic requirements to help the operators deal with many things such as accidental scans, inventory discrepancies and damaged parts that required special processing. I won’t go into all the details of the many features that I added, but the light weight and flexible UI components and the user focused design architecture made this application a huge success for Dell’s manufacturing processes related to part routing. This remains one of my greatest accomplishments while at Dell and one of the few opportunities that I have been given creative freedom and budget to take full ownership of the success or failure of the initial project requirements. Overall the solution performs better than expected and has allowed Dell to reduce operation costs and major headaches in this area of Dell’s business.