Costs less, fills faster
Within two weeks, HP will start shipping its first PCs in the United States built under the company's 18-month-old channel assembly program.
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Vanstar, Micro Age Inc. and Inacom Corp. are the first three resellers signed up to do final assembly for HP customers, according to Emilio Ghilardi, worldwide marketing manager for HP's commercial desktop computing division in Grenoble, France.
HP will continue to add more resellers, including Ingram Micro, in the coming months.
Channel assembly is part of HP's ESPP (Extended Solutions Partnership Program), in which the company wants to dramatically decrease the time it takes to deliver PCs to customers.
Through ESPP, HP hopes to reduce product delivery times from up to three weeks to 48 hours, a turnaround time the company already has achieved in Europe, according to Ghilardi.
The second phase of ESPP will be rolled out in the next six to nine months, said Ghilardi. It includes Top Value, a program in which HP and its resellers will work together to forecast and identify fast-moving system models to decrease overall inventory.
A third part of ESPP, called Vendor Express, is now in pilot with three customers, including Toyota, said Ghilardi. Vendor Express will give customers dedicated Web pages, where they can order products, track orders and submit service requests and trouble tickets.
The pilot started in December and will probably go on for nine months, Ghilardi said.
HP expects that 15 percent to 20 percent of its products will be built using its channel assembly program, said Ghilardi. Any cost savings, he added, would be passed on to the customer.
Separately, the Cupertino, Calif., company plans to unveil a services program over the next four to six weeks that unifies HP's myriad services offerings, said Ghilardi. The program, which has yet to be named, will offer users an a la carte menu of services designed to lower TCO in such areas as manageability, security, IT management, IT engineering and ease of acquisition, he said.
"We will launch an extensive program aiming at TCO," said Ghilardi. "The difference today is in services. The product has become a commodity."
Ghilardi said the services program delivers on the promises made by HP and Microsoft Corp. last March when they announced the two would work together to help lower corporate users' TCO. At the time, HP said it would offer customers services based on its internally deployed PC-Common Operating Environment, a set of services and tools that the company says has cut $200 million out of HP's annual computing costs.
Those tools will include HP's TopTools 3.0, which is due in the spring. The TopTools desktop management software ships on HP's Vectra business PCs, Kayak workstations, Omni notebooks and Palmtop PC handhelds.