Hewlett-Packard Company: Universal Power Supply for Printer Design
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It is clear that the choice of adopting a universal power supply (UPS) to place into HP printers has affects across multiple business tiers. With the incursion of additional cost of the UPC, the benefits might be difficult to estimate at first glance. However there are enough direct reasons to adopt a UPS when looked at over the entire product life-cycle (PLC), across the HP system as a whole.

Fewer parts in a product design make a more efficient supply chain. The VIPER incident is a demonstration of a time when HP had the wrong product, at the wrong time, and was forced to deal with a large stale collection. The fact that this case still resonates at HP gives evidence to its severity. It becomes evident that the 5 different business segments have conflicting performance measures. There is not a single system wide directive that makes clear the best strategy for the entire company.

Manufacturing: * Performance Metric: Work-in-progress-turns, WIP Inventory, finished goods inventory, and labor content per item
Distribution:
* Performance Metric: Inventory Levels, Total units processed per hour, Inventory Shifting, Customer Satisfaction.
Product Development: * Different Product platform releases, part number reduction, cost reduction

The management decision has to be based upon the most critical value to the velocity of inventory turns into sales. The case where manufacturing is worried about UPS supply is valid. Other manufacturing sites might try to allocate the singular UPS supply, disrupting manufacturing capacity. However forecasting demand for a single UPS is much easier than for multiple markets, and this is the overriding factor. Different periods of the PLC will have different demands. In the early two phases of the PLC it is too important to miss inventory levels. Having a UPS will help