Hewlett Packard Enterprise continues to leave a legacy in tech transformation

What is a supply chain? And, in the current climate, what constitutes a successful supply chain transformation? For a company that has made its name through technical ingenuity, it could be expected that digital enablement has been the priority. But Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Vice President for the Service Supply Chain, Danny Berry emphasises that transformation has also required an all-encompassing, whole-of-organisation approach.

Hi Danny. Many people are familiar with the Hewlett Packard Enterprise brand, but could you give us a brief overview of the company and organisation’s area of expertise specifically?

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is a multinational edge to cloud IT company that has been around a long time and founded Silicon Valley. Today, it does more than $28 billion in revenue and has around 60,000 employees globally. We support enterprise customers through a classic buy-sell model as well as through an on-premises, cloud- based subscription model called HPE GreenLake.

I lead the supply chain organisation that supports HPE’s service customers and channel partners. We have three distinct but highly integrated teams. The first supplies HPE spare parts across 170 countries in support of customer service contracts. The second sells certified HPE spare parts to non-contract customers. And the third provides IT services that help to turn individual server, storage and networking products into complete, customer-ready IT solutions. We have employees around the world focused on delivering an excellent customer experience daily.

Overseeing global supply chain operations, from an outside perspective, has seemed like something of a thankless task in recent years. What has it been like in the eye of that storm?

I think any supply chain professional across any industry would say they’ve been navigating a period like no other.

The COVID pandemic challenges required very fast tactical responses to ensure our parts were still flowing to customers, while at the same time, our people were adapting to the new norms of hybrid working. Everyone across the IT Industry has seen waves of IT component shortages in many categories, and with unbalanced supply and demand it’s typical to see pricing fluctuations. Logistic network challenges around the world have been well documented in the media, and then of course there is the ongoing situation in Ukraine. Any supply chain professional has had their fair share of headaches over the past few years. That being said, I’m very proud of how my organisation has navigated these external headwinds.

It’s also interesting how these challenges have put the supply chain onto centre stage for many companies and industries.

I see reports suggesting that supply chain courses are now among the most popular across universities, and future crops of CEOs will come from the supply chain domain. I am not sure I would have read things like that five years ago.

What specifically has been your approach to transformation during this period?

So, at top level, we thought about our journey in three, one-year phases.

Year one was really all about establishing a strong organisational and performance baseline across all areas. When your metrics are in good shape, that is actually the best time for a change. We also built our case for change, which focused on the changing needs of customers, more expectations around self-solve, product fails becoming rarer, and therefore less replacements being needed. In essence, phase one was really about preparation for our transformation.

Year two was the guts of our transformation programme. We targeted more than 80% of our activities to be completed in that timeframe and we drove strong programme governance and management of change right across the organisation. Driving a lot into one year puts pressure into the system, but we did not want our organisation to become fatigued by multi-year efforts, so it’s always a risk trade-off. We did all the typical programme things - structured workstreams, empowering our workstream leads, getting early wins for momentum, regular execution tracking, and spent a lot of time on communications activities to both share and receive feedback.

Then, finally, year three is all about optimisation and fine tuning to close out the remaining activities and tie up loose ends.

The workstreams sound particularly interesting, can you give us more detail on these?

Sure, our most foundational workstream was focused on getting a very clear understanding of our process landscape. Processes are the way we do things on a daily basis, and are really a mindset thing. We have promoted a process mindset through lean skills training and Kaizen process improvement work, so we have developed good process DNA across the organisation overall. But we decided to set up a team of handpicked experts from different areas to conduct widespread process assessments.

Once we had a better and deeper understanding of our process landscape, we began driving each process through a decision tree: Should we leave the process as is? Should we simplify or standardise it? Does it need a broader redesign? Can we drive automation into process steps to improve it? Should we migrate it between locations or should we outsource it to a partner? These are all important operational decisions.

A good example of this was in forecasting and planning, which is probably one of our most important process spaces. Essentially, if you want the right part in the right place at the right time, you have to have a solid planning backbone, otherwise you spend a

Once we had a better and deeper understanding of our process landscape, we began driving each process through a decision tree: Should we leave the process as is? Should we simplify or standardise it? Does it need a broader redesign? Can we drive automation into process steps to improve it? Should we migrate it between locations or should we outsource it to a partner?