Dell's services group has built a high-tech command
centre designed to help the company better track its support staff
and supply chain and give it a faster response time to disasters at
customer sites.
The centre will have 60 staff and is primarily being used to
give Dell a centralised place to resolve customer issues in its
server and storage business.
"The Enterprise Command Centre is looking at where the most
available technician is to the site," said Gary Cotshott,
vice-president and general manager of Dell Services. The centre
will support customers in the US, Canada and Latin America.
Dell's centre will operate continuously and has been modelled on
similar crisis centres set up by emergency response departments and
corporations.
It will also allow Dell to be more responsive in getting
customers running again after natural disasters, Cotshott said.
For example, Dell will use the centre to take a look at which of
its customers might be affected by the next major hurricane and to
then develop a plan to replace equipment that might be destroyed,
and restore the customer's data
"We can go in, look at our database, determine the bevy of parts
that we have located in the various remote parts depots," he
said.
"We want to do the best that we can to be on top of events that
are occurring," Cotshott said. "They could be political, they could
be terrorist-related, they could be natural kinds of
disasters."
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service