Re:Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed p...
by sct202 on Monday December 31, 2018 @10:04AM
(#18794743)
I wonder how much of that was politicking, where someone was keeping something purposefully bad so that they could sell a solution that "saves so much money" when a far cheaper solution would save as much money and cost way less.
Re:Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed p...
by Spooky23 on Monday December 31, 2018 @10:16AM
(#18794792)
Sometimes companies maintain high friction/high cost crap like that to scare off acquisition.
A friend worked for a regional bank that had a strategy of purposeful obsolescence to maintain control with the core shareholders, who were mostly from one family. They were using 1980s era AS/400 systems with terminals as late as 2008, and had only 1 PC assigned to a manager in the branches, with connectivity via ISDN.
Re:Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed p...
by thinkr42 on Monday December 31, 2018 @10:56AM
(#18795044)
I hadn't thought of this to be honest, but I do faintly remember the IT / Dev team using the "not technically feasible" line a bunch whenever Marketing would come through with stuff. Used to get me angry quite a bit and I saw it translate a bunch to lost revenue and increased costs.
I don't know how much of this got sent out of Marsh and up to Sun though.
Re:Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed p...
by Spooky23 on Monday December 31, 2018 @11:52AM
(#18795409)
Lazy IT people are always a good excuse too. Especially in CFO driven IT shops.
I've seen people waste millions on magical systems that did very little out of inertia. In one case, a system with something $10M in annual costs that managed terminal (as in VT-102 terminal) and line printer assignments. A decade after the printers were trashed and terminals moved to a (almost equally offensive) very expensive web-based system.
At the store we had registers with an OS from the 80's, a common thing if you look around, but we never invested in developing anything beyond the 80's unlike our competitors. We didn't ever implement a JIT style logistics program, which with massive in store staff cuts led to poor merchandise orders which in a perishable business kills you. Management in general was _highly_ skeptical of new technology and prone to spending a bunch of labor hours on repetitive, easily automated tasks (by my accounting at the time, I could have automated more than a million dollars of labor costs with a week of effort - something I brought up with management and demonstrated but was ultimately shot down, I wasn't some super genius - we had folks literally copying and pasting for 8 hours a day).
Marsh was a good company with good people, several of those in the article I knew from my time in corporate. We had folks that would kill themselves working 60 hour weeks to keep a store afloat. It sucks to see what had happened to them.