Thread regarding Sears layoffs

@4htv It isn't savage. Think personally....when you don't have money you don't spend it. I am sure the spending will open up if there is money to spend in the future. Better to be honest then to spend money that isn't there. I am sure there are still enough IT associates to run the business. If you have worked at Sears for a long time, you are probably used to the days when we had far too many associates. Now it is just how other companies run......with a far more skeletal staff. Just do your best, and if it gets to you, then it's time to move on for your own health.....if you can. Personally, at least for corporate, I think we are fine. It requires a busier schedule, but it is what it is, and I am always grateful for a job as even though everyone says there are all sorts of jobs out there, I beg to differ at the corporate level at least for retail.

@RvoZJi3-4rfn That is just plain savage honestly. Its just cutting to the point that they are going to run the company as long as they can. They have no intentions of pumping money to improve the company they are just cutting the cost and see how long it can run.

@4rfn, thanks for the insite

@4rfn. It is what it is. I dont think we have had money for new IT projects for at least three years......possibly longer. Try not to let it get to you so much.....whatever is meant to be will happen for everyone. Doesnt have to be all doom and gloom.

We had an 'All I.T. department meeting ' on Thursday Feb 1. The interim CIO told us that there is no money for projects. He also said that I.T. has told business units that the level of service they have received in the past will most likely change for the worse, and we will do the best with what we have. We are basically in RTB (run the business) mode, just keep things going... looking for opportunities to turn off old systems or processes that might no longer be relevant. I have been working in I.T. for 40 years and I can tell you I have never heard a CIO talk like this before.... (at least he was honest) but in my opinion it's like waving the white flag. I am only staying here until I retire hopefully in a few months but if I was a younger I.T. employee I would be looking to get out ASAP. There is not future IMO. And I would not plan on any severance. If you are still working at Sears consider this your 'severance'. All you are going to get is unemployment benefits and COBRA and that's it. Sears is already insolvent.

All the IT guys and women are hard workers. I just wonder when they thing the systems will fail or what event would send the systems into total lock down or how close we are to system failure?

@2zpl I think you meant to say a FEW associates working in IT. And I don't mean Sears India. That to me doesn't count.

It is what it is only because of extremely nearsighted decisions made over the years for the IT infrastructure.

@2swx It is what it is. No further comments needed as I am sure there are still many IT associates working for Sears, and they are hard workers.

Guys, I am glad I made this thread. I now understand how Sears IT is now functioning on "Bandaids" at this point. That is nuts.

Subsidies are typically negotiated milestones, lets say we can't get the cost down on a product, we can contractually set requirements that will have the vendor cut us a check if we hit said requirements.

Lets say we want to sell Samsung TVs and Samsung is being hard on cost, we can have subsidies that say if we sell 10000 units a quarter, they will cut us a check.

They could also come at it a different angle and say if you sell at least 20000 TVs and 50% are Samsung we will give you $X.

Some depts. completely rely on these subsidies to have any profit at all. These can be worth millions of dollars, so obviously you have to have your data backing up your claim that you hit your numbers, you can't just say "Yup, we bought 10,000 TVs and sold them all, and only sold 4000 of your competitors TVs, give us millions of dollars"

Even more direct is SBT or Scan Based Trading. This is basically consignment, we get product in but only pay for it when it sells. These can be anything from DVDs to larger items. As far as I know each day every sale of these products is recorded, because we need to keep accurate counts so we know how much to pay... you can imagine the vendors wanting accurate tracking for product that is sitting in our stores for free.

You also have Vendor Managed Inventory, which can be handled a few ways, where literally someone from the vendor does periodic checks, or some are more sophisticated where they want sales data of all of their products so they can forcast what to ship to our stores.

With IT reductions and the multiple layers of interactions on these types of transactions and making sure that we are compatible with external systems, to me its a heavy risk to assume we can run with a skeleton crew

What would be an estimate to transform the computer system to something more modern that can handle the new software and changes in retail? 1-2 Billion?

@2olx "Additiinally there are contract and financial obligations such as SBT and subsidies in which we need very accurate sell thru counts."

Could you share more about that? I haven't heard of this before.

There is a lot of tech that is required for day to day business, new item creation, pricing changes, SBT, reordering, deliver and install scheduling, SYW targeted ads. It doesn't matter that Sears isn't a tech company for quite a few of these things, they have built processes and expectations around these things. If Sears can't tell you when you will get your fridge, will you still buy from them or goto home depot when they tell you it'll be delivered tomorrow. Additiinally there are contract and financial obligations such as SBT and subsidies in which we need very accurate sell thru counts.

Maybe we could get by things if nothing else is changing but with things like stores closing and DCs getting reduced or refocused, usually there are changes required in multiple systems... and typically not things that were planned for and which have unintended consequences because of all the undocumented changes, workarounds and bandaids put on our systems over the years.

I've seen critical systems gutted because every single expert was laid off or quit.

Outsourcing so many things to SHI or beyond really showed me that they had no real interest in transformation, because in order to transform you need to change so many processes and systems and now they don't have the ability.

Sears is a retail shop and not a tech company like Facebook. And it's not the end of the world if some not so bright IT people get laid off. I mean stores managed to survive before the internet. And I'm sure they will survive this.

It does not take 1 or 2 people to keep things running... 1 or 2 people is just an alert system.

There were multiple system we were told when they go down, they would no longer even try to bring back up. It was literal fingers crossed that it would hold up forever.

While the old systems are designed to run stable, there is a ton of other layers that depend on people who know how these backend systems really work.

Actually has CORE ever actually gone away yet?

I was in IT till 2017. Did we not have a janitor switch off the mains or that's what they said at that time in the data centre and everything went down

Yeah..not too sure of back ups. Not even sure if they do DR drills.

But lights on is Very different to on going development. Signs point to a store less future

This will become a hedge fund AND an online only retailer. That's all I want to think about it.

So many talented people I worked with let go...shame

But I am sure they will be welcomed with open arms in other tech setups. Sears deserved them no more.

@1paa Think you could get away with sneaking out some of those keyboards? Surprised that stuff hasn't already gotten "clean & bright"ed out of there. So much still-useful stuff going to waste that they refuse to even sell at liquidation.

Apparently, the filter thought that AS - 400 was "a--". Hmmm...

I'd love to see the Troy data center. I wonder what kind of hardware they have and if it really is original when that data center was implemented 20 years ago. I wonder if there are A--.

I know that there are some really old artifacts I've come across, deep in the bowels of the store, like the green-screen IBM 3121 terminals from the 80s, a box full of IBM Model M clicky keyboards (the best out there, too bad they'll get chucked if/when the store closes) and various old systems like Pentium 166's and 286/386 PS/2's. None of those are in use but the store POS server is an IBM Pentium II server tower (1997-98ish), still running along with the SurePOS systems.

There are disaster recovery plans in place. Backup tapes are sent daily to off-site locations. If the datacenter burned down they can come up the next day at another location. Contingency tests are done routinely to make sure this works. The front end is bad I have seen cash registers held together with tape. But the back end is ok.

@1ibv, thanks for your reply. You mentioned minimal maintence and support. Are you referring to the Troy data center and HE?

Store level systems is what I am wondering about though. The store systems are in worse shape than anything else.

How bad are things at the Troy datacenter? How many people are left to run it?

If the data enter crashes and cannot be brought back online.

How could stores run store closing sales?

We need to think about everything IT wise.

this is not a big issue. The systems are old and very stable and will run with minimal maintenance and support. Skeleton staff is enough just no new big projects but that should not impact Sears at this point. If anything comes up that cannot be handled - Like an unexpected new legal issue requiring significant system changes - they would need to call in temporary outside contractors to implement the changes.

Not all of IT has been let go. When a company is on the verge of bankruptcy, you don’t need innovation. You need maintenance. That doesn’t take 20 programmers and systems designer. It takes one or 2 people to keep things running. You strip to the core...until you just die.

Funny, but seriously IT is the backbone to any company. Can I please get some serious thoughts from everyone please.

No need for IT. Eddie plans to return the days of mail catalog, carriage and buggie. he’s sent out 400 mules heading to HE. Should get there by May. He’ll show the competitors!