I have found their Indian customer service center much easier to deal with (and with more successful outcomes) by using online chat instead of the phone.

There are two things that make me think it's intentional. First, the agent I spoke with last week said that it was showing on her system as having a June 21st ship date, which is exactly the date that they e-mailed me at the last minute.

Second, they're still giving new customers an estimated ship date that's a week and a half earlier than mine. If they're telling the truth to new customers, why are they making me wait? The other explanation is that they're telling me the truth and they're lying to new customers. (A final explanation is that there's something about my order that's delaying it, but the CSRs keep telling me that it's a problem with the Axim parts, not accessories.)

I tried to use the online chat, but I kept getting a message saying that says my account isn't OK'ed to use that channel of communication or something like that. :confused:

Doppy is 100% absolutely correct. I can certainly say that I have experienced EXACTLY the same thing TWICE!!!!

I will never attempt to purchase another Dell product ever.

The fact is that Dell employs one of the most sophisticated just in time purchasing, inventory, and manufacturing systems in the world. At the time I've clicked purchase on an order, they know at that milli-second what my approximate ship date will be. If it was a day or so off, I'd be fine. But like Doppy, they had no intention of ever meeting that date. Instead, they decided to extend my ship date to three weeks from that date because they probably thought, "Well, he's waited this long. He'll surely wait another three weeks because we're Dell and he's going to get a Dell product!" WRONG!!

Dell computers can go bankrupt for all I care. I'll continue to buy my computers from companies that don't lie to their customers.

I don't know why I'm defending them, but it all actually makes total sense to me. Consider this. You have 4 departments...

1. Customer service. They answer the phone, look at the screen, and talk to you.

2. Planning. They order the products and try to guess when stuff will show up in the warehouses and how many will be available.

3. The people/system who manage sending out the messages when orders won't be shipped out on the date originally given.

4. The people/system who manage updating the web site with new estimated ship dates.

- Customer service is totally in the dark. They are entry level employees who will not know how to read the dates. They need to be able to provide more information to customers, so methods for looking in the system to see information in ways the other departments higher up in the chain than them see it begin circulating among them. This information will not be consistent with what customers have been told previously.

- The planning group has an impossible job. Supply chains are so complex these days, with thousands of components all going into a single device. A shortage on a sticker that goes on the packaging can delay an order for a week. Also tking into account that the products are manufactured in China or Taiwan adds another level of complexity. Contracts and business agreements mysteriously change midstream. (i.e. now that we have 150 pallets of your product loaded, we'll need an additional sum beyond what we agreed to to ship them.) Some companies ship certain products by boat, and that's totally unpredictable. Then, there's Customs. Also, you've got typhoons and earthquakes going on all the time at the regions manufacturing the stuff. Planning might as well throw a dart at the calendar half the time to try and figure out when stuff will be available to ship.

- The systems that process orders contain several layers. One layer may have one set of dates, but another layer may have another set of dates. Even then, none of those dates may be accurate, since the department that fulfills the demand may override the way the system fulfills demand. They probably have only a little bit of interaction with the Planning people and likely no interaction with Customer Service, yet CS has started digging around into all the layers in hopes to give a customer more detail than they have on the surface.

- The Web is a semi-detached façade from most order processing systems. It's going to be the last to be updated with new dates. I would bet the people who manage the Web site have no interaction with the planning group or the Customer Service group or the group fulfilling the orders.

Amidst all of this chaos that is any large enterprise, the government has decided to require companies to tell customers when they're getting their stuff. Wouldn't the companies like to know. ;)

I happen to know that Dell uses SAP, and SAP happens to be my specialty. SAP has inherent limitations that make it hard to give accurate leadtimes in real-world use. (For the eggheads: SAP's ATP logic depends on a FIFO model, but most companies aren't willing to permit SAP to allocate FIFO during constraint situations.) It also makes it very easy for a Customer Service agent to see conflicting dates. If training is not thorough and reinforced, then CS agents will mislead customers with inconsistent info.

Since most companies are going to be keeping metrics of the leadtimes they give to customers, they're going to engineer them to be overestimates rather than underestimates if they can, to make themselves look better. However, they're going to get nailed with an unforseen delay in supply every now and then, and the systems and processes simply aren't dynamic enough to reallign themselves instantaneously.

For any company to intend to mislead customers in hopes to win their purchase requires a level of sophistication so far ahead of where they are now that it's an impossibility. I seriously doubt that's going on.

We have a ton of people who used to work for Dell running around my offices, and their sausage making is as scary as anyone else's.

They do have some aspects of their business model that are more evolved than other companies, but most of that is smoke and mirrors to make investors feel better. In reality, all of the major players in the industry have just as advanced business models (perhaps with different sets of strengths and weaknesses).

Ugh. This thread is bringing me WAY down since I bought my first Dell lappy this morning with their massive sale. I bought in to the upgraded 2-3 biz day shipping since I need it by Saturday, but my emailed ship date is eight days from now (after I'm out of town). I've heard stories about early arrivals, but I'm very tense about it not arriving in time. :eek:

Neither will I.

**Update**

Order Processing: Monday, June 05, 2006
Pre-production: Monday, June 05, 2006
Shipping Prep: Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Ship Date: Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Arrival should be on Friday.
Four days from assembly to doorstep. Not bad.

Like many others here I have received every item from Dell earlier than estimated arrival, be it a computer product or not. In fact, every item that was to ship 2 day air I received next day morning. I have had no shipping problems with Dell to speak of. Now there customer service is a different story.

update:
yes, I ordered a canon sd700is for a friend, got a SMOKIN' deal from dell, about 35% below list price. Was to ship in two weeks, fine. Others read that their orders were to ship in THREE weeks, okay,

Mine arrived three days ago, no announcement.

In no WAY can I complain, it was not a time sensitive purchase, but to pay 370 for a 500$ item brand new, is key

Well, because not everything has to be a pro-Apple post... ;)

I like DELL products for what they are...but I DO NOT rely on them if I have a time-sensitive purchase. Period.

I just ordered the Dell Monitor 2407 (HDMI...yeah :D). According to the website I should have it in 3-5 business days and it should be ready to ship.

NOT.

When I finished the purchase online, I was told it would ship next Monday. When I got the email confirmation, it was not to ship till Monday, June 19th.

I have times when I got killer deals on hard drives from Dell and Dell did keep pushing back the dates and forcing one to reconfirm. I honestly do think that sometimes Dell does use the 48-72 hour response from customer rule to break orders that are just too good in terms of pricing...

Anyways, DELL is good for driving down prices and good product. But as a business, I wouldn't rely on them...I'll pay more for IBM etc.

Ok. So I just got an email from Dell saying the monitor has already shipped.
That's great, but really...no rhyme or reason

Three weeks later, Dell pulled the same crap, waiting until the last possible minute to announce yet another delay.

They've done a great job of turning the large, positive goodwill account they had running with me into a severely negative one.

Years ago Michael Dell was running around telling anyone who would listen what a just-in-time logistics genius he was. I ordered this thing six weeks ago. I guess this is another case of business hype turning out to be a lot of bluster.

I've never had a delay with dell shipping. I did, however have one incident:
Ordered an Axim. They shipped it just fine. What I received instead, however was a laptop that was worth about 3-4 times as much. I look at the label on the laptop box, and lo and behold, the distribution center put two labels one on top of another - mine being the top, another person's being the bottom one.

So I call dell... get India, took a while to explain what and where and how and why....It took them a while to send me a replacement. Then it took 'em about a month to generate a label for me to send them back the laptop. And they kept bombarding me with letters saying they didn't receive the laptop until I called them and gave them the tracking number that they generated initially, showing that they received the item a long time ago.

All I got in return for the hassle was a measely 30-dollar coupon.

Got a third notice of delay today. Another last minute one. This one is for three more weeks.

A Dell agent finally told me that the problem is that the Bluetooth keyboard is on backorder. That's why it's been over six weeks and I still don't have an Axim. I've spoken to about a dozen agents over that time, always asking if the problem was an accessory so we could just split the order, but they kept denying that it was, which turns out to be more lies or poorly informed agents.

Apparently Michael Dell and his self-proclaimed operations management geniusness can't figure out how to ship the main unit and accessories separately in situations like this, so they wanted me to wait at least three more weeks for the thing to ship out (for a total of 9 weeks of waiting), if they could get their hands on a keyboard that I can get overnight from Amazon.com. They had to cancel my original order entirely, then wanted to place two separate orders, one for the Axim, one for the keyboard. :rolleyes: