Alison Kent

Hewlett Packard packages its inkjet cartridges differently, for example, for Office Depot than for Costco, and HP does away with the clamshells altogether in favor of cardboard boxes for people who order the cartridges from the HP website, global packaging manager Alison Kent said.

Kent said HP, responding to customer complaints, has tried to make it easier to open the clamshells by putting indents in the plastic and instructing people on where to cut.

Alison Kent, Manager Hewlett-Packard

100 Concourse Boulevard | Suite 105 | Glen Allen, VA 23059 (804) 217-6380 | Fax: (804) 217-6381

Alison Kent

E-MAIL :alison kent@hp.com

WEBSITE :packaging.hp.com

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Alison Kent has been named Packaging Process Owner for HP Distribution Packaging.Prior to this role , Alison was the Packaging Engineering Customization Manager in the InkJet Business Unit in Richmond , Virginia.Prior to that Alison was the Trade Marketing Manager responsible for developing many of HP's Internet commerce business opportunities , technology alliances and equity investments.Alison received her MBA in Financing and Marketing from the University of Chicago and a BA in Economics from Smith College.Alison will has 4 people reporting to her.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, CA) : Alison Kent, managing dir., packaging process

-- Allison Kent, Hewlett Packard

Alison Kent, senior packaging manager for Hewlett Packard in Glen Allen, Va., agrees that an effective leader understands the unique contributions people make on a team and gets the most value out of their contributions.

"I have someone who works for me now who is the most creative person I've met in my life," she says. "He loves getting a project that's completely undefined, figuring out what needs to be done, laying out the framework. Kent says she realizes that she needs to find new opportunities that require set up for this employee and then find someone else who is good at day-to-day operations. "It's a matter of finding what someone is uniquely good at and putting them in jobs that highlight that," she says.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, CA): Alison Kent, managing dir., packaging process.

Alison Kent, manager of the global corporate packaging team at Hewlett-Packard, was reading the book at the time we went to press."The case that [the authors] lay out seems very provocative," she says.However, returnable packaging would nevertheless be challenging for HP."We change our products so frequently that there's only a limited period when the packaging material would be relevant to reuse," she says.

Regarding the argument that cradle-to-cradle can be done at the same or lower cost, she responds, "In our own investigations to use more environmentally responsible materials and designs, it's often at a cost.That's always the trade-off."But, Kent allows, "what we've been looking at is one slice of the whole system cost.

Alison Kent

Hewlett-Packard

Alison Kent - Packaging Process Owner(804) 452-5214Fax: (804) 353-6481alison kent@hp.com