Selling direct allowed Dell to keep close track of the purchases of its large global customers, country by country and department by department—information that customers found valuable. Maintaining its close customer relationships allowed Dell to become quite knowledgeable about its customers' needs and how their PC network functioned. Aside from using this information to help customers plan their PC needs and configure their PC networks, Dell used its knowledge to add to the value it delivered to its customers. For example, Dell recognized that when it delivered a new PC to a corporate customer, the customer's PC personnel had to place asset tags on it and then load the software from an assortment of CD-ROMs and diskettes—a process that could take several hours and cost $200-$300.13 Dell's solution was to load the customer's software onto one of its own very large Dell servers at the factory and, when a particular version of a customer's PC came off the assembly line, to use its high-speed server network to load that customer's software onto the PC's hard disk in a few seconds. If the customer so desired, Dell would place asset tags on the PC at the factory. Since Dell charged customers only an extra $15 or $20 for the software-loading and asset-tagging services, the savings to customers were considerable. One large customer reported savings of $500,000 annually from having Dell load its software and place asset tags on its PCs at the factory.14 In 1997, about 2 million of the 7 million PCs Dell sold were shipped with customer-specific software already loaded on the PCs.