HP Inc. Advanced Analytics Powers Technology in the Service of Humanity

Hewlett-Packard was founded in 1939 as the Silicon Valley icon and reinvented in 2015 as HP Inc. – a technology company that believes one thoughtful idea has the power to change the world. Its product and service portfolio of personal systems, printers and 3D printing solutions helps bring these ideas to life.

HP operates in over 170 countries with more than 200,000 channel partners around the world. It is among the world’s largest IT companies, with more than 50,000 employees and $63.5B in revenue in its 2021 fiscal year. HP is ranked #56 on the Fortune 500 list. As an award-winning leader in sustainability with more than 37,000 patents, HP is delivering on its mission to create technology that inspires ambitious and meaningful progress.

History of OR/MS at HP

HP has a rich history of technical contributions in the areas of operations research and management sciences (OR/MS). Over the years, HP has published many articles and has been recognized broadly in a wide spectrum of areas, including inventory management, purchasing strategies, forecasting advances, cybersecurity and sustainability.

One example of HP’s OR/MS prowess over time stems from the ever-challenging goal of optimizing both the product portfolio and supply ecosystem to cost-effectively provide customers with the right product at the right place and right time. In the late 1990s, in collaboration with Stanford University professor Hau Lee, HP pioneered the large-scale implementation of late-point product differentiation to enable greater variety at lower costs and faster lead times. In 2009, HP was recognized with the INFORMS Franz Edelman Award for two powerful operations research-based solutions for managing product variety to better align portfolio management decisions to customer and market demands. The innovations honored were a result of a collaborative effort between HP Labs and HP’s Strategic Planning and Modeling (SPaM) team. Those innovations resulted in over $500 million in increased profit. Moreover, they enabled product portfolio simplification, improved execution, achieved faster delivery, reduced overhead, and increased customer satisfaction and market share.

HP has built upon these successes by increasingly driving its portfolio toward digital differentiation, where products are individually customizable via internet-enabled offerings, thanks to a vast array of analytics that power the products and ecosystem. On the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, HP is also at the technological forefront of 3D printing. Together, these capabilities are set to change both portfolio and supply-demand dynamics in ways never before thought possible.

Advanced Analytics Organization at HP

Given HP’s scale, advanced analytics capabilities have never been confined to a singular team or function. Rather, analytics teams are the lifeblood of HP’s inventive spirit and therefore distributed across HP’s functions and business units. Some teams, such as HP Labs and SPaM, work cross-functionally on a variety of analytically complex, mission-critical operations management challenges. Over the years, analytics professionals across HP have found a variety of ways to collaborate and share best practices.

A shining example of effective collaboration at HP is its Data Science and Knowledge Discovery (DSKD) affinity group, which is dedicated to extracting useful knowledge from data. Formalized in 2016, DSKD is composed of more than 3,000 members who hold biweekly knowledge sharing sessions and annual internal summits. The 2021 summit included 114 presentations over three days, culled from more than 500 submitted papers. Topics presented included proactive and predictive services, deep learning, reinforcement learning, data preparation and feature engineering, product improvement, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled automation, mixed-integer time-phased optimization, business process automation and much more.

In addition to this broader community, DSKD members have also formed more focused collaboration workgroups to tackle topics such as data engineering, AI/ML security and applied ML. The DSKD membership is particularly proud of one of its grassroots efforts that HP’s executive leadership embraced and disseminated across the company: the HP Data Rules of the Garage. At the heart of this new cultural imperative (adopted in 2021) is the recognition that a strong data culture is one that values data as an asset and places a premium on data quality, access and utility.

Every organization that implements analytics will certainly encounter challenges with data at some point. For companies in the digital age, data is critical beyond analytics projects – it is the lifeblood of end-to-end ecosystems. HP’s digital transformation is powered by a healthy culture that values the importance of useful data, and the Data Rules of the Garage have driven meaningful management of change by increasing awareness of best practices for all employees.

These rules have become a catalyst for critical mindset shifts in awareness, shared responsibility and accountability. The vision is a workplace where everyone appreciates the value of the data they generate and work with – no matter their official role – and in which data stewards are passionate about the datasets they own and are accountable across the entire organization.

As HP’s data culture transforms, its ability to impact change through advanced analytics increases.

HP Advanced Analytics Highlights

Advanced analytics supports HP’s mission of powering technology in the service of humanity. The following includes three diverse and high-impact examples.

Instant Ink. Everyone hates running out of ink. HP Instant Ink solves that problem with a pioneering ink and toner subscription service for consumers and small businesses. The service is an example of HP’s mixed digital and physical capabilities, which provide a great customer experience and up to 50% cost savings to more than 11 million subscribers worldwide. Unlike an ordinary Internet of Things (IoT) device where services are only delivered digitally, Instant Ink combines IoT telemetry data with physical distribution systems. HP uses ML and data from subscribers’ printers to predict when new cartridges will be needed and prescribe efficiently timed delivery of new cartridges, ensuring that customers never run out of ink. HP Instant Ink has the added benefit of decreasing the carbon footprint of ink purchase and distribution by an average of 73%, while reducing energy use by 69% and lowering water use by 70% compared with cartridge purchase and recycling through traditional retail channels.

Optimized Constrained Supply. A COVID-driven surge in demand is causing unprecedented supply and demand imbalances. In response, HP’s SPaM team developed a new mixed-integer goal program optimization engine that allows HP to provide implementable supply plans to manufacturers. The engine also generates innovative analytics that reveal high-impact opportunities for further constraint mitigation and demand shaping. The optimization engine is unique in the flexibility and speed with which it can be expanded and tuned to account for evolving business logic and multiple objectives. This project is just one example of how supply chain agility and supplier collaboration has helped HP navigate a very dynamic supply-constrained environment while improving supply chain resiliency. HP’s more agile supply chain has been especially critical to enable the migration to a global hybrid work and learning environment.

Amplify. In support of HP’s goal to become the most sustainable and just technology company by 2030, HP launched the Amplify Impact Program in 2021. This program was designed to help HP and its partners drive a more circular and low-carbon economy, cultivate a more diverse, inclusive and equitable supply chain, and improve the vitality and resilience of local communities. HP has trained, educated and empowered more than 10,000 partners across 40+ countries to drive change while maximizing opportunities with sustainability as a key competitive differentiator. HP’s commitment to sustainable impact helped the company gain more than $3.5 billion in new sales in fiscal year 2021, a three-time annual increase.

Led by Values

While well known for technical contributions, HP is equally recognized for its management principles, coined “The HP Way.” At its core is a culture of trust, respect, inclusivity, teamwork, innovation and integrity. These principles make HP a destination employer where every employee can make extraordinary contributions, and the employee experience is broadly recognized. In fact, HP won more than 200 workplace awards in 2021 for leadership in diversity, sustainability and innovation.

As HP co-founder Dave Packard said, “I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being.” True to this founding principle, HP envisions a world in which technology drives extraordinary contributions to humanity with ambitious goals as a lighthouse brand affecting the climate crisis, ensuring human rights for all and reducing the digital divide. As a global leader in sustainable impact, HP has received numerous accolades, including 2022 recognition as:

• #1 America’s Most Responsible Companies, Newsweek
• #52 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World, Barron’s
• #27 America’s Most JUST Companies, JUST Capital

Advanced analytics professionals at HP operate at the intersection of technology and humanity, informed by data and empowered by creativity. There’s no shortage of interesting and challenging problems to solve, and HP teams continue to deliver financial performance to stakeholders, innovations to customers and improved conditions in global communities.