The main floor of Gateway 2000’s headquarters in North Sioux City, S.D., reverberates with the hum of conveyor belts and buzz of electric screwdrivers. When Gateway 2000 says "factory direct," you can take us literally. Our corporate headquarters is built around a huge manufacturing center that turns out thousands of PCs a day. The North Sioux City plant, combined with Gateway’s major manufacturing plants in Dublin, Ireland, and Malacca, Malaysia, built and shipped more than 1.3 million systems in 1995. In 1996, Gateway added a second U.S. manufacturing site in Hampton, Va.

Each system rolls down Gateway’s assembly lines with a white custom configuration sheet attached to it. The sheet identifies the customer and lists in detail the components he or she ordered. Skilled manufacturing employees efficiently install the components, with each person checking the work of the person just up the line. Finally, the systems are preloaded with a customer-selected operating system and software bundles, thoroughly tested by a quality control technician and shipped to the customer’s door.

Quality comes first in manufacturing as it does throughout Gateway. Gateway 2000’s North Sioux City manufacturing plant, customer hardware support and remanufacturing operation are ISO 9002 certified. The International Organization for Standards system was adopted by the European Economic Community to standardize quality among major trading powers after trade barriers were removed.

Gateway remains pro-active in its pursuit of quality through a supplier certification process that clearly outlines expectations and procedural requirements for all component suppliers. When a supplier is certified, it means we have inspected their internal processes, and they have passed our rigorous tests. Our suppliers must attain a manufacturing and field acceptance level of no less than 99.7 percent for each component.

For corporate and education accounts, Gateway takes the custom-configuration model one step further with our Custom Integration Services. CIS allows large business customers to integrate some unique hardware or software not normally available from us within their Gateway systems. Although not available through all purchase vehicles, this option can provide significant cost and efficiency benefits to those who purchase in volume.

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