Categories: uncategorized
Date: 02 April 2007 13:07:38
I'd been able to leave work earlier than expected on Thursday, as the meeting I had to attend finished after 15 minutes. I was accompanying one of our sales people to a meeting with a customer local to my normal workplace. I'd told people that this was a waste of time and that they were closing at the end of the year. It is another case of a large US corporation closing down an existing site and moving production to cheaper locations, in this case China, Czech republic and Mexico.
This will have a disasterous effect on the local town. It employs 165 people and is the town's largest employer. This will mean that there is only one manufacturing facility left in the town, the one I'm at. There are no other jobs in he locality for these people. They'll either have to commute to Coventry or Birmingham, if there are jobs, or leave the area. Another nail in the coffin of rural life in the UK.
It also showed me that our management are as in touch with the customers as usual. The fact that I had to tell them that the plant was closing, even though it had featured on the local news several times in the pat 2-3 weeks. They were also told that the business we had was all we'd get as the company had recently awarded their global contract to a large competitor. This information was in the company's sales system but ignored.
When I'd met the salesperson at the factory we'd both been a little taken aback. I'd been told to attend to provide support to her as she's new. She'd been told that I was attended as a Project Manager who was going to offer our services to move their equiptment when the factory closed. Unfortunately neither of us were told the truth.
On my way home I had a call from my boss asking how the meeting had gone. I then discovered that I was there to spy on the salesperson and report how effective they were. She has failed to win any new business and our temporary boss has the guns locked and loaded. I explained that she couldn't be expected to sell to this customer when the work was actually controlled in Germany and that we had not even bothered to quote when the contract came up for bidding.
We have a problem with our sales staff. The good ones leave after a few months, taking several customers with them. The others are left to struggle on with little help, support or training.
Our company are currently in the middle of a bidding war. Our CEO in the US has bid to take us private. A Private Equity Firm that owns one of our competitors has also bid but been obstructed every inch of the way by our board of directors. Now they are taking the company to court alledging that they are not conducting an independent biding process but following our CEO's instructions.
The worst thing is that the two companies would be a perfect fit. We can do our job well and they are better at the contract logistics side, i.e. warehousing, distribution etc. Maybe I'm right when I say that our CEO is only interested in the bottom line and not growing the business further. After all he has to claw back the several millions he lost after his divorce last year.