I just visited Dell in Round Rock, Texas, for some super-double-sekrit meetings regarding their future product plans. Can't talk about those here. But I and another CNET editor also got a tour of the Morton Topfer manufacturing plant, where Dell makes Optiplex desktops.
The plant was humming when we toured. Bins of Dell parts shuttled around on elevated, automated tracks. Elevators lower them to workstations where the parts are assembled into a finished PC. A good assembler takes about five minutes to snap all the pieces together, and then puts the completed PC back into the system, where it shoots off to testing, burn-in, and software loading.
On one end of the 250,000 square-foot facility, trucks unload PC parts. There is no inventory warehouse attached to the factory -- that's down the road at the Supplier Logistics Center (SLC), where Dell leases warehouse space to its suppliers. In neat accounting trick, Dell doesn't actually take ownership of components until the moment the parts are unloaded at the factory. Much has been written about this zero inventory, just-in-time manufacturing process. It was interesting to see it, though.
Tidbits: The average time it takes a single system to be built, once it is ordered, is five hours. The record is one hour. In other words, once somebody ordered a PC on the Dell site, and one hour later it left the factory on its way to them. All Dell desktop PCs are built to order; there is no stock of pre-built machines waiting for orders. It costs more to ship a Dell PC than to assemble it (not surprising, considering how fast their assembly people are).
Until this tour, I was wondering why Dell, which makes high-end gaming PCs (the XPS line), didn't offer a water-cooled unit. Now I get it: There's no way you can build a water-cooled PC in five minutes with current parts. Apple has liquid cooling on its Power Mac G5, but the radiator unit is a plug-in cartridge; most current water-cooled PCs are nightmares of tubes.
About the photo: You can legally carry a concealed firearm into a building in Texas. Just not into one of Dell's. I couldn't take pictures inside the factory.
