Dell Inc.’s CEO week blamed too-conservative sales forecasting for the long delays in getting new notebooks to consumers, but he said nothing about problems in painting the laptops, the main reason other executives have given customers.
Speaking at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York last week, founder and recently renamed CEO Michael Dell said the company underestimated demand. “If you go back six months or so when industry growth was starting to pick up, we had quite a conservative forecast for demand,” Dell said during the extended Q&A. “That turned out to be incorrect.”
Dell customers have complained about notebook delays on Dell’s own Direct2Dell Web site as well as other message forums, such as NotebookReview.com, citing shifting shipping dates, suddenly canceled orders and difficulties with outsourced support personnel. Initially, the delays were limited to the XPS M1330 notebook, a top-of-the-line system introduced in late June, but the Inspiron budget line has also been plagued with shipping problems.
Every other explanation for the backlog has pegged paint problems — the Inspiron, for instance, is sold in eight different colors — as the primary cause. LCD shortages, although mentioned, have always been relegated to second place.
Dell, however, laid all the blame on the forecasts, which in turn resulted in the company placing too-small orders to its component suppliers. Not enough parts equals problems building machines in a timely fashion.
That will change, he said. “We’ve spent a lot of time on getting much more rigor in our longer-term forecasts, a couple of quarters out, so that we can accurately signal to the supply base what our needs are.”
