20 minute read
An exclusive interview with Danny Berry, VP of HPE Pointnext Services Supply Chain
by iThink Media
DANNY BERRY SERVES AS VICE PRESIDENT OF SUPPLY CHAIN WITHIN THE TECHNOLOGY SERVICES UNIT FOR HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE, BRANDED AS HPE POINTNEXT SERVICES. THE SUPPLY CHAIN ORGANISATION CONSISTS OF THREE INTEGRATED TEAMS.
anny begins, “The first team is responsible for getting spare parts to our enterprise customers, this is the backbone of the organisation. Here the goal is to get the right part to the right place at the right time with the right quality and cost. It’s simple to describe – it’s not simple to do! Our customers include 90 per cent of the Fortune 500, and HPE has built one-third of the Top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world – so part availability and speed are vital to serve our customers’ needs. Following a diagnosis, we may need to have a part at site or get it to site in a few hours, depending on contract levels. The interplay between our technical support centres, supply chain, and our field engineers needs to be frictionless. We are with our customers in their hour of need, 24×7×365, shipping parts to more than 170 countries. That is our value proposition – our responsiveness, our ability to get things fixed, the assurance we can offer our customers.”
The second team is a sales operation, selling HPE genuine authorised parts to customers who do not have active support contracts or have
out-of-warranty products. Danny explains, “Cybersecurity is a big concern to many enterprise customers. You only have to read the news. Counterfeit parts or malware risks can lead to catastrophic consequences, security breaches, ransomware, data loss. Data is one of the most crucial assets a company has – so why risk it with bad quality parts?”
The third and final part of this services supply chain is the Integration Services team, otherwise known as Factory Express Services. Danny explains, “We have Supply Chain team members embedded in our product factories across the globe. Customers have needs all along the spectrum, from simple asset tagging at one
end, right through to integrating a range of servers, storage and networking devices into a complete customer-ready solution – a turnkey solution involving complex hardware and software, ready to switch on fast and gain productivity. The team can enable a lot of customisation in a short amount of time, almost like the customer having their own factory.”
Many HPE Pointnext Services customers are undergoing massive digital transformations, leveraging the expertise the services organisation within HPE brings. Similarly, the supply chain team is in a constant state of evolution, driving customer centricity and identifying smart digital deployments.
“We base our strategy and plans around five focus areas,” explains Danny.
“Customers are always our #1 focus area. Ensuring we are doing the day job well to give great customer experience is always our primary concern.”
The next focus area is Optimisation. Danny continues, “As operations or supply chain professionals, we are always looking for the best balance point between a whole range of things like speed of
response, inventory investments, transportation, warehousing, costs and more.
“The third focus area are supply chain spaces where we want to Innovate & Transform. We examine our business, asking ourselves: ‘Will this improve a customer’s experience? Does this make a team member’s job easier? Does it help us improve a key metric?’ If it doesn’t pass these types of test questions, it does not get done. As business leaders, we have all seen pretty slides that change nothing. None of the leaders I speak to across the industry have time for innovation for the sake of innovation – it has got to make a real difference. This balance between ongoing optimising and transforming is tough – performing and transforming at the same time is always a challenge.
“Next comes our Big Picture focus area. In simple terms, that means hooking into and supporting the big strategic plays at an HPE Pointnext Services level and at an HPE level. It’s important that busy people in big organisations don’t work in a bubble – so getting very clear on the spaces where we need to support the big picture is important.
“And our final focus area is People & Culture. It’s our people who develop strategies, drive the projects and change programmes, run the daily processes, come up with the smart ideas – our people are the foundation of everything we do.”
A key area of focus for optimisation in recent times has been part returns. Every time a part is replaced, the Supply Chain organisation works to recover the failed part. With millions of customer contracts to support globally, this is no
easy task. The Supply Chain network consists of hundreds of technology manufacturers and logistics partners around the world. Parts are planned and positioned in more than a thousand stocking locations globally, including regional distribution centres, country hubs, field stocking locations, as well as ‘smart spares boxes’, which are secure customerdedicated lockers directly on a customer’s site.
The team felt there was strong potential to improve the part returns space, as explained by Danny, “We were spending a lot of time continually optimising our forward supply chain. This is natural when you have a customer event – a sometimes critical situation you have to design for – but we had simply spent less time on the reverse supply chain part returns. We analysed our varied customer landscape and the wide variety of approaches in recovering parts that it created. We needed to optimise the part returns situation on many levels. We also felt it was an area ripe for a digital transformation and innovation partnership.”
Says Oliver Lemanski, CEO of OnProcess, “We began
discussing reverse supply chain processes with HPE back in 2020. HPE wanted to apply a consistent global approach and to dramatically improve effectiveness. But it wasn’t just the case of chasing their customers and getting any part back – they needed intelligent, informed decisions based on real-time information. We worked together to get a much clearer insight into customers’ behaviour and tuned approaches based on these insights. Now one year on, around 97 per cent of HPE’s service part returns are handled automatically using our technology. Even though 2020 was probably not the best year to launch a programme on such a global scale, HPE and OnProcess decided it could still be done; and, frankly, we proved it.”
Danny adds, “In simple terms, this is about delivering a superior customer experience and better sustainability. Global standard approaches, things like standard self-service portals allowing returns declaration, arranging pick-up, and printing shipping labels, are particularly important for global customers. We capture important returned part data right at source – for example, on mobile apps on field engineers’ phones – to analyse the data and drive better
decision making. There’s no point in transporting parts around the world, increasing carbon footprints, if we end up having to scrap it. We analyse data to understand if we should be doing ethical e-scrapping locally. We can also work with part vendors more effectively to determine the right course of action on defective parts that are in warranty. In parallel, we can work with repair partners more effectively regarding the repair and re-use parts that are out of warranty – this is our circular economy in action. We are proud of our efforts in sustainability across HPE, and this work is another step in the right direction.” Digital innovation is changing customer experience in other spaces, across Supply Chain and HPE Pointnext Services. Traditionally, if a customer needed technical support, they would phone a support centre for a remote diagnosis, a part would be ordered as required, and an engineer sent to make the fix. HPE Pointnext Services are midway through an extensive Digital Customer Experience (DCE) programme with key service functions engaged including Supply Chain.
Central to DCE is a single sign-on customer personalised portal. This workspace captures a broad range of customer information including
The principles of traditional manufacturing supply chains that have served us for decades are now being seriously questioned. The ‘makeuse-discard’ model - where we extract the earth’s resources to make and build products that are shipped around the world before being used, then thrown away after we have finished with them - is now seen as a wasteful and unsustainable approach that does nothing for the world’s resources and contributes to dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.
An alternative model based on what is called the Circular Economy focuses instead on designing products and their underlying components to be easily serviceable, and retained within their own supply chains by recovering them for refurbishment, reassembly and re-sale. The processes involved in these service events – in particular around the logistics of parts - is known as the service supply chain and is now seen as critical in driving sustainable practices and closing the loop on circularity.
But it is not just environmental reasons that are driving this move to more circular service supply chains. There is often huge value left within parts and products in the field, recovering that value can add millions to a business’s bottom line. In addition, the challenges in global logistics and the scarcity of materials and parts have made businesses re-think how they build resilience into their supply chains; and recovery of unused products and parts could just be the way to do it. The circular supply chain
A critical part of implementing a circular service supply chain are the processes used to recover products, materials, and service parts. It is often assumed that the expense involved in this recovery would be prohibitive. Not so. Once processes are in place, the payback can be immense. The cost of re-using recovered parts and materials is often substantially lower than procuring new, supplier risk and volatile price variations are contained, and of course environmental targets can become much easier to attain.
But it is not just about Recovery. Smarter more dynamic service supply chains focus around three main functions:
A critical part of implementing a circular service supply chain are the processes used to recover products, materials, and service parts. It is often assumed that the expense involved in this recovery would be prohibitive. Not so. Once processes are in place, the payback can be immense. The cost of re-using recovered parts and materials is often substantially lower than procuring new, supplier risk and volatile price variations are contained, and of course environmental targets can become much easier to attain.
But it is not just about Recovery. Smarter more dynamic service supply chains focus around three main functions:
1 2 3
Plan Deliver Recover
which ensures service parts and inventory are available and in the right place to meet any relevant service level agreements which ensures those service parts are delivered to customers according to those SLAs which ensures as much value is recovered from parts used in the service event
Historically these functions have operated almost independently. The circular service supply chain however, links them together such that Delivery information informs returns and recovery schedules, recovery data provides real-time input into future planning cycles, deliveries inform planning processes on inventory and service needs, and so on. Importantly all of this should happen with those service-levels, or rather the service experience of the end-customer put right at the heart of the processes.
All sounds great, but the challenge is less about whether to implement a more circular approach to service supply chains but rather how to do it ….
The solution is digital and it starts with data
It may sound obvious but knowing who and where your customers are and importantly what products they have and where they might be, is crucial if good after-sales service is desired. If that information is not easily available, wrong parts can end up in the wrong places, parts can be shipped when none were necessary, and failure warranties can remain unclaimed. Getting that information means starting with underlying data. The problem is that the data is almost always spread across disconnected systems and data siloes.
That’s why a smart solution to this starts with addressing the data problem first. A technology platform that connects those different systems and data streams into a unified form allows insight and intelligence to be extracted and the Plan-Deliver-Recover cycle to operate in a frictionless way. And such a technology platform would also facilitate new digital-first approaches to process execution such as customer self-service portals and apps, dynamic routing and returns logistics of parts based on new metrics such as environmental impact or customer experience – welcome to a new service era.
To find out more about OnProcess and the OnProcess Agora™ platform please visit www.onprocess.com
Oliver Lemanski, CEO of OnProcess
products, contracts, support cases, engineer visits, and real-time status on the environmental health of the customer’s IT infrastructure, providing feedback and proactive guidance helping them to avoid issues. Intelligent search capabilities guide customers to digital and video knowledge on demand for self-serve enquiries and troubleshooting. Customers can create cases and utilise AIenabled virtual engineers to assist in solving technical issues, or be connected to live engineers in a seamless manner.
“We are currently building supply chain capabilities into the DCE workspace to allow customers to order and track parts following an AI-guided problem diagnosis,” notes Danny. “We will then merge
Typical service supply chains are a web of disconnected, manual processes managed by siloed departments and systems. Information is difficult to share, inefficiency is rife, and precision is hard to deliver.
OnProcess Agora™
That’s why OnProcess developed OnProcess Agora Recover™, a cloudbased asset recovery solution that offers easeof-use, with self-service applications linked to a powerful network of data and analytics.
Built on the OnProcess Agora™ software platform, Agora Recover optimizes the asset recovery process - facilitating, tracking and expediting the return of assets and service parts from the field. In turn, this helps to dramatically reduce costs, increase revenue streams while improving customer experience, all while feeding those parts back into the value chain for increased sustainability.
Delivered as a fully managed business service, OnProcess Agora and Agora Recover are used by some of the world’s most recognized technology brands to drive new levels of service into their after-sales supply chains.
To find out more please visit www.onprocess.com
in our returns and part sales portal capabilities, to provide a one-stop shop for Supply Chain needs in the DCE workspace. The Digital Customer Experience programme is redefining how we work with customers, moving us way beyond a traditional break-fix, reactive model that is prevalent in the industry. As we migrate customers onto this platform, it is giving them a better customer experience. They are getting answers faster and it gives them more control. We are working to migrate our entire customer base. DCE engages customers to allow them to get more from their IT investments and enable better business outcomes for them.”
Inside the HPE Pointnext Services Supply Chain organisation, Transformation activities are being driven in a broad range of areas – some traditional, some with a more digital flavour. Danny explains, “The digital technologies talked about in Industry 4.0 offer fantastic opportunities, but they are not the cure all or a silver bullet for all situations. It’s always a blend. Some of our current work in the supply chain process space is a good example.”
The organisation is currently engaged in an end-to-end assessment of all day-to-day activities and processes using lean methodologies. All team
members have broad based training in lean principles and are encouraged to move through yellow, green and black belt levels and lead kaizen-type process improvement projects. Danny explains, “We are constantly driving our processes through a ‘standardise and simplify’ improvement cycle. We are also identifying opportunities for process automation. My Supply Chain organisation was a bit behind the curve on things like robotic process automation (RPA) – but we decided to jumpstart this by re-orientating a Supply Chain team with good core analytical skills. We are now progressing very quickly and using the capacity we generate to do more valueadd work. The last part of the process assessment work is the classic Do-versus-Buy question, continually assessing our process landscape to find possible candidates for outsourcing – so it’s always a blend of traditional and digital.”
Artificial intelligence is not just creating better experiences at the customer interface, it is being further integrated into Danny’s organisation. He and his team are engaged in an internal partnership with HPE AI data scientists and consultants. They have developed an ongoing programme of AI projects that is focused on tackling a range of supply chain challenges. The goal is to make their supply chain more effective, but also to show customers how AI is being deployed in action – proof points and use cases to educate and inform customers.
Danny shares a simple example; “Supply chain professionals are swimming, sometimes drowning in a sea of data. It becomes a problem when that sea is polluted with bad quality data. Take Bills of Materials (BoM’s) for example. These are the product recipe lists we use in manufacturing and supply chain environments. The basis of most materials planning is a BoM multiplied or exploded by a forecast of some sort. Typically, BoM data is entered manually into IT systems, which is a process prone to mistakes. You don’t tend to see problems until after the fact, things like missing parts. We’ve partnered with HPE AI experts and have utilised AI algorithms to identify potential issues in our BoM database. We have an enormous amount of BoM’s, we are supporting customers with parts for many years after products have stopped being manufactured, and we can use AI to correct issues in a much more efficient, almost surgical way. That is simply not possible using
manual approaches. If you then take a step back and generalise the problem of bad quality data at an industry level, how much data we have now and growing exponentially, AI is going to be the only way we are going to be able to get a handle on these types of problems.
“We are using AI to help us cleanse data like BoM’s and Contracts, but also using AI to improve and monitor key processes like part forecasting and part ordering, as well as drive supply chain network design improvements. It’s exciting times in terms of digital innovation, but it’s all based on a foundation of smart people.”
The conversation returns to the fifth and final key focus area in the HPE Pointnext Services Supply Chain strategy, People and Culture. Danny explains, “We encourage our team members to really own their careers, take some risks along the way with different jobs or rotational opportunities, and really adopt a ‘develop by doing’ approach. We have development programmes to support our team members at different stages of their careers
including interns, early career, and top talent. Our programmes typically consist of skills-based training, mentoring with leaders across the organisation, and teambased projects. We have good gender balance in our team, from early career to our mid-range job scopes, but thereafter, we identified something of a ‘broken rung’. Supply Chain launched a female development programme to help ‘rebuild the ladder.’ We are currently in our second year of this successful programme, now seeing our female team members securing some great new jobs and promotional opportunities – it’s inspiring to see this talent mobility. We are driving hard in the whole area of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). We have an active Supply Chain DEI council, with team member representatives from across our organisation. The council provides guidance and feedback, and drives trainings and actions at a grass roots level. Our Supply Chain organisation is comprised of a diverse employee base across 50 countries, many of whom are working from home. Driving
diversity, equity and inclusion is not a passing trend for us, it’s a business essential, simple as that.”
As for the future, Danny says Transformation is going on across all areas of HPE Pointnext Services and HPE. He explains, “There’s a major consideration going on in just about every company around digital transformation, but the degree of success and speed varies considerably. Companies are also in a massive dilemma regarding the cloud – should they stay in their onpremise IT infrastructure, or should they move their compute and storage needs to the public cloud? Bottomline, customers want the flexibility of cloud, but are concerned about security and losing control of their data. HPE is transitioning, bringing the cloud experience across all applications and data, from edge to cloud. During 2022, the entire HPE portfolio will be made available as a service through a range of subscription and pay-peruse offerings. Customers will get the financial scaling and flexibility they want, retain control, and enhanced security. Cloud is an experience, not a destination. Supply chain capabilities right across all areas of HPE will continue to be a critical enabler and differentiator across our entire portfolio of HPE GreenLake cloud services. We really are in very exciting times.”
