The last part of our tour covered the packaging and shipping of the newly manufactured computers. Dell uses as much environmentally friendly packaging as possible for the 20,000 systems that get shipped out of their Limerick facility every day. Contrary to what we thought these systems are shipped out of Limerick by road, using up to a hundered trucks that pull right up to the facility' loading bays. Distribution is then done throughout the Europe, Middle-East and Africa region either by road or air by local distribution centers on mainland Europe.



Fig 11. Packaged systems are scanned and distributed to the trucks waiting.



Fig 12. Hundreds of carton boxes containing PCs, servers, notebooks, etc.



Fig 13. Loading the trucks with hundreds of boxes, ready to be shipped off.
One thing was obvious though during our visit to Dell's facility, this facility is able to produce and ship an amazing number of computers every day. The rate at which we've seen PCs come off the assembly line was astonishing; we've seen workers put a whole PC together in about three minutes and notebooks in less than that. That concludes our Dell factory tour, and although we only managed to show you a selection of the photos we’ve taken, and the different product lines we've come across, we hope you’ve now got a better impression of how Dell manufactures it's computers. Thanks again to the friendly people at Dell for inviting us and showing us how they get the job done. If you have any questions, or would like to learn more about a certain product or technology be sure to drop us an email and we’d be happy to answer your questions or requests.

Sander Sassen.