Analysis of the Dell IdeaStorm Community

Question: Describe about the Analysis of the Dell IdeaStorm Community. Answer: 1: Dell, the most popular PC maker in US held a great success story from 1990s to early 2000s. During this time, Dell grew at an astonishing rate and was far more profitable than other competing PC makers were. Dell was competent for its direct selling to customers and cutting out wholesalers and retailers. Huge numbers of customers accepted the low price products of this organization. In this way, the organization became able to increase its sales volume. The website of Dell allowed customers in mixing and matching the product features like microprocessors, monitors, DVD drives, mouse, memory, internal hard drives and keyboards (Dell.co.in, 2016). Customers had the ability to customize their system. The ability of customized order had made the customers to repeat their purchase. Apart from that, the growth of this organization came from its ability to manage its supply chain effectively. It had ultimately minimized the cost of holding inventory. Having large inventory acted as buffe r for the organization and minimized uncertainty in supply chain management. Low labor cost and high productive employees along with tax exemption in some countries had minimized their operational cost (Martin et al., 2014). As a distinguishing real entrepreneur, Michel Dell has shared passion of making peoples life easy. With full of determination, Michel Dell brought lot of innovative technologies to customize the ordering system of their products features. Dell invented advanced server for the customers, which had ultimately the market share of the company. Dell had strong tolerance of ambiguity. He had found market for its manufacturing in several countries, where labor cost and operating cost was low (Bayus, 2013). It considerably lowered the cost of operation for the organization. In order to fix problems of direct customer interaction, Michel Dell invented direct sell of their products to the customers. He had also brought creativity in their product design like PC design and tablet design. It had attracted huge numbers of young generation customers and thereby increased the sale volume. Dell maintains global cohort with access to mentorship, resources, solution, and exclusive market efforts. Mich el Dell invested $ 300 million in strategic innovation venture fund, which actually helped them in their growth trajectory (Klinker et al., 2015). With high level of innovation power, Michel Dell started to be lighter and thinner, which was an attraction to most of the customers. 2: From 2007 onwards, the profitability of Dell started to decline, while its competitors like Apple and HP started to show their performance. During the recession period, from 2008-2009 demand of the customers from the business had been slumped (Gharakhani et al., 2013). Apart from that, during 2000s, HP learned about the way of outsourcing PC making for reducing operational cost. On the other hand, HP had also diversified their products portfolio beyond PCs. It started to sell advanced storage device, network equipments and other consulting devices to the customers, which helped in business growth. Dell was not competent enough in researching and developing, which was needed in competing with Apple and HP. Dell started to force its sell by regular brick-and-mortar retailer like Best Buy and Wal-Mart (Bratnicka et al., 2013). It had lowered its performance level and profit level. On the other hand, Apple had started to gain market share from Dell through differentiating its product portfolio in term of design, performance and ease of use. On the other hand, Dell was not that much able to improve its design and remained old fashioned. Lack of adequate innovation to impress new generation customers led Dell in losing its profitability. Michel Dell is taking innovative strategies and structures for tuning out his company performance. Dell took is utilizing the advantage of WWW, where it feeds real time information regarding changes in material demand from the suppliers (Pugliese et al, 2014). Seeing at this information, suppliers can alter their production components as per the need of the company. Thus, they have maintained strong relationship with the suppliers. It had also driven down the cost and price of Dell by enabling their supplier in successful just-in-time production. In order to beat the competitors, Dell has diversified its product portfolio in phones, tablets, servers, software, and data storage device, HDTVs, printers, MP3 players and network switches (Dell.co.in, 2016). Organization has chosen niche market for customizing their products and proving better customer satisfaction. The company is also focusing on improving the design of their products so that it looks attractive to the customers. References Bayus, B. L. (2013). Crowdsourcing new product ideas over time: An analysis of the Dell IdeaStorm community.Management science,59(1), 226-244. Bratnicka, K., Gabrys, B., Bratnicki, M. (2013, September). How Organizational Creativity Influence Firm's Profitability: The Moderating Role of Corporate Entrepreneurship. InEuropean Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship(Vol. 1, p. 116). Academic Conferences International Limited. Dell.co.in. (2016).Dell.co.in. Retrieved 12 August 2016, from https://www.dell.co.in/ Gharakhani, D., Rahmati, H., Farrokhi, M. R., Farahmandian, A. (2013). Total quality management and organizational performance.American Journal of Industrial Engineering,1(3), 46-50. Klinker, S., Terrell, R. and Mahfouz, A.Y., 2015. Dell's Use of CRM-SCM Integration to Dominate the PC Market.Communications of the IIMA,6(3), p.9. Martin, K., Chitalia, P., Pugalenthi, M., Rau, K. R., Maity, S., Kumar, R., ... Kesanapally, C. (2014). Dells Channel Transformation: Leveraging Operations Research to Unleash Potential Across the Value Chain.Interfaces,44(1), 55-69. Pugliese, A., Minichilli, A., Zattoni, A. (2014). Integrating agency and resource dependence theory: firm profitability, industry regulation, and board task performance.Journal of Business Research,67(6), 1189-1200.