HP SPaM
Encyclopedia
HP SPaM is an internal consulting group that supports HP businesses on mission-critical strategic and operation decisions. SPaM's mission is to drive innovation and data-driven decisions in HP through assisting with analytics
Analytics
Analytics is the application of computer technology, operational research, and statistics to solve problems in business and industry. Analytics is carried out within an information system: while, in the past, statistics and mathematics could be studied without computers and software, analytics has...

, consulting
Management consulting
Management consulting indicates both the industry and practice of helping organizations improve their performance primarily through the analysis of existing organizational problems and development of plans for improvement....

, and operations management
Operations management
Operations management is an area of management concerned with overseeing, designing, and redesigning business operations in the production of goods and/or services. It involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as little resources as needed, and...

. As evidenced by its publications and awards, SPaM has been a prominent example of the deployment and practice of OR/MS (operations research
Operations research
Operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations...

 and the management science) in large companies. Together with HP Labs
HP Labs
HP Labs is the exploratory and advanced research group for Hewlett-Packard. The lab has some 600 researchersin seven locations throughout the world....

, SPaM represents HP at the INFORMS Roundtable, a group of organizations whose purpose is to promote OR/MS excellence in practice.

Contributions

SPaM pioneered and leads innovation in supply chain and procurement practices. They created dramatic improvements in manufacturing, distribution, procurement, product design, forecasting, metrics, and inventory control
efficiencies; leading to the publication and adoption of their methods outside HP. Notable contributions include:
  • Popularizing and helping to drive the adoption of postponement in high-tech products, as a gain in efficiency in building responsive supply chains that support a high variety of product versions (SKUs or stock keeping units) and configurations

  • Developing and popularizing the concept of using a single metric to measure the full end-to-end costs associated with carrying inventory, to support better supply chain decisions.

  • The use of simple, practical spreadsheet tools to deploy the power of advanced statistical inventory target setting to a broad range of businesses.

  • Popularizing the concept of product design for supply chain; leading product development teams to minimize end-to-end costs for design, production, distribution, and support instead of focusing solely on minimizing material costs and development schedules as was previously common practice.

Founders

The team was established in 1989 by Corey Billington (currently a Professor at IMD
International Institute for Management Development
IMD - International Institute for Management Development is a non profit business school located in Lausanne, Switzerland.- History & Mission :...

) who had recently joined HP and was working with Sara Beckman (currently a Senior lecturer at UC Berkeley). Billington asked then HP CEO Lew Platt for $100K to start a team focusing on efficiency and inventory within HP. Soon after, Corey added Tom Davis, Paul Gibson, Steve Rockhold, Rob Hall, Marguerita Sasser, and Ed Feitzinger to the team and began a fruitful collaboration with Hau Lee (then a young Professor at Stanford and currently the Thoma Professor of Operations, Information, and Technology at Stanford Graduate School of Business) and M. Eric Johnson (then an HP employee 1988-1991 and now Professor and Director of the Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth).

The name SPaM came from HP internal location code (LOCXXXX STRAT PLAN MODEL) initially assigned to the group during the days of limited identification fields. SPM and SM were two initial possibilities but the group settled with the more pronounceable SPaM. This was the day before internet era where spam
Spam (electronic)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...

 was not yet synonymous with unsolicited or undesired bulk electronic message.

Directors

  • Corey Billington (1989–1996)
  • Rob Hall (1996–2000)
  • Gianpaolo Callioni (2000–2003)
  • Scott Ellis (2003–2007)
  • Thomas Olavson (2007 - 2011)
  • Brian Cargille (2011 - Present)

Logo

The triangles in SPaM logo represent inventory
Inventory
Inventory means a list compiled for some formal purpose, such as the details of an estate going to probate, or the contents of a house let furnished. This remains the prime meaning in British English...

 – the largest asset on the balance sheets of most consumer electronics
Consumer electronics
Consumer electronics are electronic equipment intended for everyday use, most often in entertainment, communications and office productivity. Radio broadcasting in the early 20th century brought the first major consumer product, the broadcast receiver...

 manufacturers and certainly the largest asset of HP. The blue bell
Bell (instrument)
A bell is a simple sound-making device. The bell is a percussion instrument and an idiophone. Its form is usually a hollow, cup-shaped object, which resonates upon being struck...

 shape represents uncertainty
Uncertainty
Uncertainty is a term used in subtly different ways in a number of fields, including physics, philosophy, statistics, economics, finance, insurance, psychology, sociology, engineering, and information science...

 (including bell-shaped normal distribution) which exists in most decision making situations. The combination of the shapes is meant to represent SPaM's intention of using analytics to enable decision making under uncertainty to improve asset management performance.

Locations

SPaM has been supporting HP businesses from 3 strategic locations;
  • Palo Alto, USA (Headquarter) : Worldwide and America
  • Grenoble
    Grenoble
    Grenoble is a city in southeastern France, at the foot of the French Alps where the river Drac joins the Isère. Located in the Rhône-Alpes region, Grenoble is the capital of the department of Isère...

    , France: Europe, Middle East, and Africa
  • Singapore
    Singapore
    Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

    : Asia Pacific


Recently, SPaM decided to no longer work out of Grenoble, and will serve Europe, Middle East, and Africa clients through Palo Alto and Singapore offices.

Services

SPaM employs consulting engagement model where HP businesses pay SPaM for each engagement (project). Key practice areas include:
  • Supply Chain
    Supply chain
    A supply chain is a system of organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. Supply chain activities transform natural resources, raw materials and components into a finished product that is delivered to...

     Strategy and Design
  • Operations Tools and Processes
  • Pricing Analytics

Members

SPaM members are Analytical Business Consultants (ABC) who share strong interests in addressing business decisions from analytical and data-driven perspective.
Typical members possess domain expertise as well as consulting and project management experiences from management consulting firms, or companies in their own industries. Most have earned MBA, Master’s, and/or Doctoral degrees in technical fields such as economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...

, engineering
Engineering
Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...

, management science, operations research
Operations research
Operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations...

, science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

, and statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

. Some individuals who are members of SPaM are also recognized both in the academic community and/or across various industries.

Awards

  • In 2000, Wal-Mart
    Wal-Mart
    Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. , branded as Walmart since 2008 and Wal-Mart before then, is an American public multinational corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company is the world's 18th largest public corporation, according to the Forbes Global 2000...

     named HP as its Supplier of the Year. HP's innovative supply-chain-management models developed by SPaM helped reduce the retailer's inventory-related stock outs.

  • In 2002, INFORMS gave HP an award for effective integration of Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS) into organizational decision making, attributed to partnership between SPaM and HP business divisions.

  • In 2004, HP received Purchasing Magazine’s Company Medal of Professional Excellence. Product design for supply chain and procurement risk management -- two innovations developed by SPaM -- were mentioned as contributions that led to the receipt of this award.

  • In 2005, design for supply chain and procurement risk management -- innovations developed by SPaM -- were honored by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals
    Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals
    The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals is the leading worldwide association of professionals in supply chain management. The CSCMP is a non-profit association that provides leadership in the development, design and improvement in occupations that deal with logistics and management of...

     (CSCMP) as two of the Top 10 Supply Chain Innovations of the Year.

  • In 2009, HP won the INFORMS Franz Edelman Award, which recognizes outstanding examples of operations research-based projects that transform companies, entire industries, and people’s lives, for its successful product variety management initiatives. The innovations being honored were a result of a collaborative effort between HP Labs and SPaM, which have saved HP more than $500 million between 2005 and 2008.

Publications

SPaM members have published more than 50 articles on the applications of operations research and management science to solve HP business decisions. Many have appeared in widely referenced business journals such as Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review is a general management magazine published since 1922 by Harvard Business School Publishing, owned by the Harvard Business School. A monthly research-based magazine written for business practitioners, it claims a high ranking business readership among academics, executives,...

 and Sloan Management Review. Members have served as an editors to supply chain textbooks used in graduate school programs, and HP supply chain innovations developed by SPaM are cited in many supply chain textbooks. Brian Cargille, currently a SPaM member, has served on the Editorial Advisory Board of Supply Chain Management Review, an industry magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

, since 2006. Many MBA programs teach techniques created by SPaM members as part of their curricula.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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