How to be a value chain architect

I’ve come up with a term for what businesses want from their vendors: they want us to be value chain architects.

This idea started back in the early days of my career in the consumer PC era. I remember a very interesting visit with a retailer where I looked at our products versus our competitor’s, and I didn’t see any strong differences. I asked the retailer: “Why are we outselling our competitors 2-to-1?”

The retailer said, “It’s because you’re always in stock.”

For me, that highlighted how critical it is to work with your market and its retail seasons, from your designers to your supply chain all the way to your customer, and everything in between.

When you hear about a company selling five million units in three days, it’s always because they planned for those three days months in advance. You can’t only create great products and expect them to fly off the shelf. You have to optimize the whole value chain to ensure it. And that can be quite the balancing act.

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What’s involved in a value chain?

I like to use analogies.

The way I see the relevance and the importance of the value chain is like this: Imagine that you are, hands down, the greatest ship builder in the United States. Cargo ships, cruise liners, all kinds. Everybody wants you to design, build and deliver their ships for them.

You are located in Wyoming.

For those who aren’t as familiar with US geography, this might show you what I mean:

This is only a problem if you don’t plan for it.

You can build the best product in the world, but if you don’t have the routes to market properly set up, if you don’t have the right marketing messages, if you don’t have the right manufacturing chain and forecasting model and supply and inventory stocking, you’ll never get to the point of true success.

You’re not only as good as the product you design, you’re as good as the product you get into the hands of your customers. You’re as good as every link in your value chain. And you have to be the architect ensuring it’s built correctly and runs smoothly all the way down.

Our channel partners at Lenovo are considered part of our value chain, for example; we sell to them, they resell to their customers, and they’re dealing with unique configurations customer-by-customer, too. There are many things we can do to make things easier for our channel partners to respond to their customers faster, such as providing minimum-viable base models with option kits and configuration rules. We’re working on that as we speak.

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How this applies to my current role: Lenovo Workstations

I have to go to bat as an advocate every day to make sure all the pieces of the Lenovo Workstations value chain are lined up for us to be successful. That’s because the workstation business is a little different to the rest of the PC business, just different enough that we need to actively manage the difference. We’re smaller - perhaps 5-6% of overall commercial PC volume - and we overwhelmingly deliver custom configurations, where nobody wants the same as another customer.

Our value chain starts with our customers. This goes back to our mission statement: helping customers accelerate their workflows, no matter how or where they’re executed. We start conversations with customers asking where their workflow challenges and bottlenecks are, what they’ve thought about doing to solve those, which applications give them the biggest challenges and opportunities. We work through the questions end-to-end. Then we start talking about the hardware and the solutions that we have available to help them solve for those specific challenges and accelerate growth.

The pandemic is a perfect example. We had customers saying, I need to keep my high knowledge, high skill workers working. I need a way for them to connect back to the mothership, and collaborate with their fellow workers.

So we set them up with mobile workstations for their home offices, complete with secure virtualized environments, so employees could log into their workload and virtually act upon their project. We were later able to evolve the solution to incorporate NVIDIA Omniverse, enhancing and improving how they could collaborate with colleagues on different parts of designs.

This was a solution that started out as continuity management and evolved into acceleration as we came to terms with our new era of work. It’s still evolving today. We have customers now who have come to us to optimize their hybrid states of work, to achieve faster and stronger performance whether their employees are in the company office, at home, at client sites, or anywhere else. The ThinkStation PX is a great example of a hybrid workstation that can be used to full power in the office, but it can also be used as a remote host, especially for customers who find the cloud cost-prohibitive from an operational expense standpoint.

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How to become a value chain architect yourself

Here are my top considerations for value chain success:

• First, it starts with a product that hits the bar in terms of solving problems, being high quality, and delivering good user experience. This includes research, design, and manufacturing.
• Second, the delivery mechanism - actually getting the product all the way to the customer at the moment they’re ready to buy, and ready to use.
• The third most valuable component is service, or what marketers call the nurture phase of the pipeline. After you’ve delivered the product, what more can you do for your customer to ensure their satisfaction and workflow success?

If you’re a master ship builder based in Wyoming, how are you going to get your cruise liner all the way to launch day in San Diego? Look at where you can stimulate greater performance in any or all of these parts of your value chain. Look at what your competitors are doing in their value chains. Look at where your differentiation lies - what you do best, and what you can do better.

The more you can prove yourself to be a powerful value chain architect, the more value you will in turn be able to provide to your organization - and, perhaps even more importantly, to your customers.