Central customer service that then gets outsourced. Marketing teams assigned to servicing customer accounts. Then lay them off. Centralize complaint intake, then outsource that function. Manufacturing plants that remove inspection steps, drive work to poor quality suppliers in a never ending effort to reduce cost. Do more with less, when you were already overwhelmed is not sustainable. It has all undermined the foundation of the organization.
What @bz+1m2hsyrxb said.
Tom only has one operational model - move a function to a so-called lower cost area, until that lower cost area is not that low anymore. Then rebadge to Genpact and other outsourced organization, then move it offshore. Then hire a bunch of low skilled workers and wonder why the quality of work is so poor. Then go back and blame the US based people. That's what BD has become - one big joke of circus!
@be 100%. I worked at another major med device manufacturer that had an effective, capable centralized organization. When done well, a strong central team frees business specific resources to manage their own initiatives. Those BU teams then go perform and come up with process improvements that are shared back to the rest of the org....everybody wins. Despite its longstanding history, BD lacks the business maturity and leadership capability to lead an effective central org. The incompetence is layers deep, and while we have some truly wonderful and talented people, high performance is not rewarded or encouraged. The culture is broken.
@j7 You can create an entire MBA curriculum of business case studies titled ‘how companies get it wrong’ using the endless examples from BD. The examples cover all disciplines too. I’m not sure what they do right.
The decision to strip overhead out of plants—where results are measured and resources are accountable—and move it into centralized teams that own nothing and essentially just consult is mind-blowing. The work doesn’t disappear; it just gets pushed onto the already limited resources left at the plants.
Go rage-click through the org chart and find the perfect storm: a centralized team with a remote, director-level role and no direct reports. Just one person building their own little kingdom of inefficiency, creating more layers and complexity while somehow justifying their own existence…
@be TGS is full of people came through references. Then those mor0ns hire sh!tty vendors to deliver AI solutions in lieu of kickbacks. Once i tried to use such bs solution and almost lost the account. Later I came to know TGS leaders got promoted for that project 😀
@OP it isn't because they were centralized - centralized functions can still be accountable - the problem is the id--ts they put in charge of the centralized functions. These people could not be further removed from reality or process or system or data. All the right people have been removed. None of those left have a single clue