Partners: HPE Has Made Big Gains In Supply Chain Operations Metrics
‘[HPE Executive Vice President and General Manager of Operations] Mark [Bakker] looked for feedback and information from channel partners, went to work with his staff and made improvements,’ says CBTS Business Alliance Manager Ron Nemecek.
CBTS Business Alliance Manager Ron Nemecek says Hewlett Packard Enterprise has come a long way since he and his team met with HPE Executive Vice President and General Manager of Operations Mark Bakker a year ago at HPE Discover to seek improvements on critical services and delivery metrics.
“Mark looked for feedback and information from channel partners, went to work with his staff and made improvements,” said Nemecek, discussing what he called HPE’s “better predictability and overall supply chain delivery” for the $1.3 billion HPE Platinum partner. “That is what we should expect, and it has been delivered. That is what makes HPE a valuable partner to us: that predictability and those kinds of results.”
Nemecek is not alone. Partners say Bakker, a 30-year-plus supply chain veteran who cut his teeth heading up supply chains around the globe for HP, has stepped up the supply chain team’s game considerably over the last several years to deliver noticeable improvements with heavy lift supply chain changes that have improved the partner experience.
Among the achievements in the last year are a 50 percent improvement in the time it takes HPE to deliver a product once it is ordered from in the range of mid-20 days to about 16-to-17 days. What’s more, HPE is now hitting the forecast date of delivery to a customer site 85 percent of the time, up 40 percent in the last year. Overall, HPE is either hitting the forecast date or delivering early most of the time, said Bakker.
Bakker attributes the success to better end-to-end supply chain integration with a “relentless focus” on what he calls “moments that matter”—moments that provide an opportunity to cut through the processes and systems that are adding bureaucracy and complexity to the partner and customer experience.
That focus on “moments that matter” is redefining critical partner and customer pain points with increased automation, digitalization and even leveraging AI solutions, said Bakker.
“We’ve been on a journey the last three years to connect a lot more of these systems together to have data feeds that feed into a unified data lake that allows us to apply more AI-type applications, some traditional around data and data management and some of it around generative AI, which we’re starting to apply in different places. That helps our employees and our partners to have better visibility, better insight, which leads to better decision-making and improved execution,” said Bakker.
The focus on improving the supply chain metrics requires a relentless focus on simplifying myriad systems from HPE, its manufacturing partners, suppliers, solution providers and customers.
The director of a multinational solution provider behemoth said the supply chain system and process improvements have resulted in a 50 percent to 70 percent improvement in orders that are fully automated for the customer with no touch from the solution provider itself, said the executive.
“That is a long journey we have been on with HPE, and it is only possible because we have been partners for so many years,” he said. “Both sides were willing to invest so much up front in working on those systems because it is ever-changing. It is not something you set up once and you are done.”
The big supply chain improvements replaced a manual process that required many touchpoints by the solution provider on ordering, delivery and more. That has opened up additional business opportunities for his company, said the executive.
The supply chain changes have provided an Amazon-like buying experience for customers with the partner automating order status and shipping dates, said the executive. “Those things are really important for customer satisfaction,” he said.
HPE and the solution provider are collaborating, adding more functionality to the partner and customer experience supply chain, said the executive. “We can only do that because we have teams on both sides working constantly on improving those processes,” he said.
The executive said Bakker deserves a lot of credit for cutting through the complex legacy systems from acquisitions like Aruba and Nimble that were on different systems. “Combining all these completely different approaches into one new system, that is a really big task,” he said.
Bakker said the IT infrastructure architecture changes aimed at improving the connectivity between partners and HPE has been critical to the supply chain improvements.
“It was very important that the ability to transact in an automated fashion was stable and performed well,” he said. “We have made tremendous progress. And, as a matter of fact, with a number of partners we have continued that journey by implementing additional API connections, whether it was increased transaction flows around order management and invoicing that automated the process so it was touchless, which is much appreciated [by partners].”
HPE said it now has six partners live with 24 API connections with a 99 percent success rate for transactions with a response time of less than three seconds.
In addition to the focus on systems connectivity, HPE has identified “policies and procedures” that included “artificial boundaries” or too many “checkpoints” or “control points” that have been changed for the better, said Bakker.
“If you think about a partner just wanting to submit a quote and get a price back if you put five levels of approval in the system, it is a problem,” he said. “So we have gone into each and every step and identified significant opportunities to simplify the process and look at policies.”
Bakker said he and his team are focused on continued “digital transformation” around the entire partner and customer supply chain from quote to cash to global supply chain to service and support.
“It is all about digitalization and automation of processes and capabilities where possible, leveraging the different elements of AI,” he said. “So we are leveraging traditional AI, which is all about data processing and making it simpler for employees to get access to the data.”
Reflecting on all the supply chain improvements, Bakker said he is most proud of how the HPE team across multiple functions including IT “rallied” around elevating the partner experience.
“We need to make sure we think about the experience they have and make them more successful because if they are successful, we are successful,” he said.
Bakker said he and his team have a “dig-deep” and “roll-up-our-sleeves” culture that has been a huge factor in the supply chain transformation.
“I always walk around with my sleeves rolled up,” he said. “I make a point of that to let our team know, ‘I am with you guys.’ We roll up our sleeves and get to work. Some of this stuff you find is going to be ugly. We need to just knock it out one case after the other with a customer and partner focus. It is really all about getting into structural improvements not just focused on one thing but really looking at system capabilities, performance and stability, looking at processes that need to be improved. We look at policies and ask does it make sense to do that to our partners—why don’t we simplify some of these things? We are just grinding it out. I am proud of how everybody stood up and said, ‘Enough is enough. We are just going to get this done.’”
Nemecek, for his part, said the continuous process improvements made by Bakker and his team are a testament to the long-standing “open, honest, and transparent” partnership HPE has built over many years with its partners. “We put a premium on partners that we trust, that listen to us, that collaborate and take action collectively with us to make things better for our customers and their experience,” he said.
