BusinessWeek has a short piece on steps taken by Dell’s Senior Manager of Global Packaging, Oliver Campbell, to reduce the computer company’s shipping waste:
Another innovation story Campbell shared: he was part of team working with an enterprise customer which had purchased several thousands of Dell servers about a year ago. He noticed that after the installation, the client was faced with a huge pile of packages. “Literally, there was a mountain of server-boxes. I thought, there has to be a better way of doing this,” Campell told me. It was a Friday night, he said, and the server installation was the last job of the week. Campbell and his colleagues were sharing beers with the clients to wind down and celebrate the end of the installation, as people do to keep customer relationships alive and well. And then Campbell started paying attention to the six-packs’ packaging–and inspiration hit.
Dell and Two Behind-the-Scenes Green Innovation Stories–involving Blogs and…Beer? [BusinessWeek.com]
I’m disappointed that Campbell’s anecdote didn’t include making a fort from the boxes.
YDEREKY – I guess it’s just one of those things that didn’t seem like a good idea until they thought of it themselves.
Very much like convincing a small child to do anything.
Reggiep, except they make good quality, reasonably priced, reliable computers that people buy in huge quantities all while making a profit at it.
You know, other than that, they might be a lot like the “big 3.”
I initially read that headline as “How Dell is repackaging waste.” Seemed to fit.
Dell is shit. Possibly the worst American company after the “BIG 3″ auto manufacturers.
This may very well be how Dell ended up implementing multi-pack shipping, however, we asked for it years ago. In my previous life, I was working for a large corporate high enviro-conscious organization and this was something I asked for every time we could. We talked about it when I visited Dell in 1999. We mentioned it at most of our meetings. It seemed simple. Yet, we were told that it didn’t fit into their streamlined mass-customized just in time warehouse model. So, we asked again the next year.