Home Office terminates order for 16,000 PCs from Dell The Home Office gave Dell just a fortnight to custom build 16,000 PCs but an admin cockup led to the order being shelved, and it is not clear if it will be re-tendered. A mini-auction took place in the first week of March with a build and delivery date set for the end of the month. Most of the tier ones competed on the deal …
"Yes that's fine we can deliver 16,000 PC's by the end of March, however are you able to accept delivery and pay the invoice into our bank account before close of business on 5-April? ... what do you mean you don't have the facilities to unload the 30+ lorries and store the PC's..."
That's one of the hiccups of public spending. There's usually no incentive to save money, and to date no one's come up with a better system that still allows the public infrastructure to maintain itself. And there's no way to know for sure if any given agency is cutting the bottom dollar out of any deal because part of any twisted bureaucracy is the kickbacks paid to any agent responsible for maintaining or auditing it or any agent that would be doing it, on upward.
I was on a team that set up (unpacked) 500 Dell desktops at a new school and every one of them had the mouse double bagged and cable tied and boxed separately. Why is this? By the time we finished, there was so much plastic and polystyrene and cardboard floating around that the site manager had to tell us off for not making more of an effort to fit it all into the industrial sized skip (I say skip but it was one of the ones you get in recycling sites, at least 4 times bigger than a skip). of course all that crap is light and blows straight out again but Dell doesn't give a shit, they could have sent us a box of 500 mice and even saved money but no they hate the environment so much that they would rather eat into their profit margins to help destroy it.
"they could have sent us a box of 500 mice and even saved money"
Sorry, life's not like that. I'm pretty positive that Dell do not manufacture their mouses (mice? meeses?) so they would receive them already packaged, for them to unpack 500 and then re-pack them into bigger boxes would cost them money and create extra waste with them disposing of the same packaging that you were troubled by and additionally the big boxes for the 0.5 kilomouse.
If they were double bagged in each box and if Dell specified that their contracting manufactures should pack them like that then Dell could and should change that.
Dell has made great efforts to reduce packaging impact, we've for the most part switched to using packing and filler from sustainable, re-recyclable sources where possible. http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/dell-environment-packaging-and-shipping
However, what you experienced is often an effect that is unavoidable. Modern PC tendering often focuses purely on (low) price. Low price requires us to both buy in bulk and handle as efficiently as possible. That means even where assembly of parts and orders is done, it is often done by robots, or at high speed by workers. adding 20-30 seconds to unpack and repack is simply not affordable.
As i'm sure you are aware, they is a very slim profit margin in a modern PC, either you have to be willing to pay more, or we have to be able to make them even less expensively... Since everyone wants a quality product in the end, something has to give, that is often in the double bagging/packaging.
I am not an official Dell Spokesperson and am no authorized to speak on their behalf, I am though an Executive in the Software Group at Dell.
Maybe a bit cynical but..... is it possible that they were in cahoots, ie for the Treasury's purpose the books will appear that the money went out in FY 2013/14 so that budget will be reallocated in 2014/15 (16k x say... £500 = £8m!) and then the order is cancelled shortly thereafter and those lovely people at Dell give them an £8m credit which goes back into the pot without any money ever having to go anywhere....thoughts?
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