Thread regarding General Electric Co. layoffs

Interesting comments. I says the market is right-sizing itself and unfortunately everyone is feeling it. When times were good, the power-grabbers, career-managers, polititians, business school finance types, and HR were given the reins to the company. Know-it-alls without technical backgounds or manufacturing experience became "Black Belts" in 4 weeks for quick promotions, doing immeasurable harm to long-established processes and taking away promotions from staff that truly understood what it takes to design and manufacture and maintain top quality products. Arrogant managers with huge egos opened manufacturing facilities where there were no markets, initiated reorgs and IT programs and latest fad "quality" initiatives where there was no need, wasting 100s of Millions in the process. Money that could have gone into new product and technology--but that would have taken too long for these pass-through types. So-called Leaders who preferred to listen to consultants instead of to their own, experienced staff. And for what? All for funny-money savings and short term resume enhancers and changes for changes sake. I could go on. Alstom was a mistake, for sure. It was going to go out of business on its own, and neither Immelt nor Bolze and Co. had the slightest frigging clue what they were getting into. Not only that, but they mucked up the integration big time. They knew the market wasn't suddenly and miracuously going to recover. Knobody could have been that stupid. So there was another plan. Guess we'll never know. What's even more tragic is that neither Alstom's nor GE's leadership during the past 15 or 20 years had the intelligence, foresight, patience and stamina to adapt their business plans, strategies and cultures to succeed in a changing market. Well, maybe the jury's still out on GE Power, but it's not looking good, cause the same types are still in charge. And they're coming with new buzzwords: Digital Industrial and Synergies and other BS are gonna save us!! A few of us! For sure....maybe!!! It's more of the same. Someday somebody will write a book about it.

The real problem is GE Power management.

We used to have world class experts that grew up in the business and knew it from bottom up in great depth in areas such as manufacturing, engineering, sales and marketing, and the service business. Most of these business leaders were well known by customers, and knew the customers and their needs well.

Now we have a bunch of self serving six sigma type amateurs with little knowledge and completely isolated from our customers and business needs. They just want to get promoted for being change agents and have made bad change after change that has left the business a mess.

Does anyone have any faith these clowns can fix the business?

Are there enough leaders left with enough knowledge of the business?

This is the big question

The problem is not Alstom.

The problem is that GE bought Alstom, and in doing so now has huge duplication of factories and functions on top of all the duplication that GE had before purchasing Alstom from years of bad management. Taking on Alstom is even worse than the bloated and disconnected organization created in Atlanta and duplicate non productive facilities GE Power built in India and China,

Now GE Power is awash in duplicate non productive facilities operating at low utilization factors instead of just several product departments where almost none make their own parts anymore. GE now has a huge bloated inefficient cost structure that is dragging down the whole GE corporation..

Just keep blaming alstom for everything. Who cares they are nothing nobody anyway.

Did Alstom fail to read the market?no

Did Alstom built that ridiculous inventory? no

Did Alstom overhyped the AGP sales? no

Did Alstom pulled accounting games to Nasdaq? no

Alstom had problems but GE has bigger problems than Alstom, so man up people.

@QFTF2jQ-zgc well said, now extrapolatextrapolate to GE power. Dude trust me it's the same sh-- show

There is a Alstom Steam Turbine for a nuke plant, being built in Schenectady. Its a complete sh-- show! From the salary person that hasn't much of a clue, to the lack of Alstom hands on knowledge passed on to build the thing. Its taken Bangor more than 6 months to work on building one up there. A very ridiculous design, very sub par from the GE Nuke model. Sad waste of manufacturing time and money!!

@QFTF2jQ-zgc, You raise some good though troubling points. As I hear this and other examples of what Alstom really did, I really have to wonder what the "clean teams" really did? Inventory stuffed everywhere, turbine performance not what we expected, muddled costs.... Just stunning how poor the due diligence was or how well the bad news was hidden.

Alstom has 5X the workers needed to make turbine generators?

That's not too bad - compared to GE Power Atlanta that has well over 14X the people there doing what used to be done in Schenectady when product service was part of turbine engineering. They also had experts dealing with customers and field engineers.

Now Atlanta is a cesspool of six sigma managers with little to no product knowledge with the PAC answer center. Customers are leaving GE and going to mostly ex-GE competitors because of they can't get to experts when they need them. This and FieldCore is destroying the service business.

As someone currently in the middle of this Alstom mess, I can verify this is a true possibility that Alstom may bankrupt GE power and maybe even GE whole. Alstom had 5x the headcount they needed to support their level of sales/work with dozens of factory rooftops, most less than 25% utilized. A bloated, out-of-control organization that looks like 30 year old corporate structures with redundancy throughout. Alstom corporate culture is diametrically opposed to the lean, efficient “GE way”. I am now convinced that Alstom never made money, they just used accounting games to make projects look profitable while hiding hundreds of millions in costs in “in-efficient workforce” and “quality” accounts. It has been >2 years since the Alstom acquisition and we STILL don’t know what an Alstom Steam Turbine costs to manufacture. The tangled web of factories and confusing accounting principles make it impossible…the conclusion is that Alstom did not know the costs of their products/services, therefore his not know their margins or profitability…no surprise Alstom was weeks away from bankruptcy when purchased by GE. Alstom was a government backed corporate social program to keep Europeans employed….and GE is now the host. It can’t go-on this way..the question is 12,000 enough?

So..the questions is…why in the world would GE adopt any Alstom products or processes going forward?

Agree. A disgrace. During my forty years it was very very tough at times but I was always proud of my company. Now, I fear, my grandkids may not know about GE. The good name and reputation may disappear. All due to poor decisions by overpaid and under experienced pass-through managers. Wouldn't you love to see the powerpoint presentation that justified the Alstrom purchase?