After last Wednesday’s mass lay-off, the plug has been pulled on Kenmore Direct, formerly known as Sears Commercial and Sears Contract Sales. That division for a long time was the best run business unit in Sears as a whole until Eddie brought on his lackeys to ruin it. When I first started, Bill Collins was the VP and general manager. Mr Collins had a reputation of being incredibly difficult to work for and I believe the truth was he wanted it to succeed so badly that he would lay into anyone that wasn’t giving 100% effort every day. If you worked hard and did your best, he would take you under his wing and look out for you. Fast forward to what we had now and it was a night and day difference. Upper management went from a guy who had been there 30+ years that gave his heart and soul trying to make it work, to a bunch of incompetent drones that only had destruction and liquidation as their main goals. Congratulations Todd, you’ve gotten what you wanted. I hope you, Boutros, and Eddie are proud of yourselves.
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Don is a complete idi0t! Know nothing and is probably the reason for all failures.
they aren't officially done, but limping along with very few remaining resources. There was a time where they sold and serviced well. However, they lost sight that a certain amount of resources are always needed for each customer; large or small; profitable or not. Those resources are still needed. The small customers s—ed up their resources— and their inventory. Then, sales got personally greedy and destroyed the BUs margin UNnecessarily.
Small and medium sized customers will always be very profitable** if*** they don't deplete your human resources. Enter the kenmoredirect.com website, regrettably it is not equipped to handle those prime b2b customers in an efficient manner. If this efficiency is ever realized, the margins are nearly double that of the giant accounts, simpler to manage and you now have a scaleable system that would be ready for a full press marketing and sales blitz to try and recover from this near-death experience.........But not in the current state. I will tell you that just selling 'hard' is stupid unless you first have a system in place that can allow for growth. because if that inventory ever comes back, that growth will have to happen in a matter of a few months to show the kind of trend needed to keep it from being sold or shut down completely. Good luck to those still at KD
@10PcCQEi-1nmk I hope the sale fails then because we all know the money is NOT going to go back into the stores, it's going to Eddie and his cronies.
There's a pending deal (could still fall apart) to sell Kenmore to Lowe's. The success of Craftsman has exceeded their expectations and they are thinking they could do the same with appliances.
RIP Sears and Kmart. By 2020, all of the stores will be gone.
I think they spent $23 million on SAP implementation (project Comet) back in 2013 and then turned on a dime when some crack babies on press 1 decided to steal customer credit card information. Instead of taking the necessary precautions to ensure associates with criminal intentions aren’t in a position to access sensitive data, they decided to sc-ap SAP in favor or Admin Toolbox and CPQ. Instead of spending maybe $10,000 in background checking associates, they threw at least another couple million dollars away changing from a stable system that worked (SAP) to one that acted like it was written by a marginal programmer who just got off a meth binge.
The Sears/Kenmore reputation is trashed. No one wants to spend $$$$ with a bankrupt business.
They blew millions of dollars on SAP, which ended up working pretty well in the end. Then, when some call center associates stole some customer credit card information, upper management decided to go on a PCI craze and replaced SAP with some crackhead program that didn’t work at all.
In IT we made many changes to the systems for Sears commercial sales... and now it's done? Figures, we spend tons of cash on system changes and then the plug is pulled. Some business person says "if we change we'll save x millions of dollars", we are pressured to make a deadline and then either the savings never materializes (or) the concept fails.
The truly sad thing is the one Manager who was driven to save the business was let go. Steckbeck, Lederer are complete mo–ns. Neither had a clue JN was the one manager still putting up results. All people keep worked for him