I work for the equipment and supply distribution department at a large US foodservice distributor, I am in inside sale, doing quotes and orders. I connect the sellers and their customers to the manufacturers, being the intermediary in our company that maintains the relationship between the manufacturer and our company. There are 7 of us associates on the special projects team – we work the BIG orders, dealing almost exclusively in new restaurant buildouts and full remodels. Our orders typically are more than $20K and I had one that was almost 1.3 million by the time all was said and done.
Anyway, our CEO was ousted by a hostile takeover by a group of activist investors who weaseled their way onto the board a couple years ago, they wanted the stock price to go up so they could make more money for themselves no matter the cost to employee wellbeing or customer relationships. These toxic bastards don't bring anything to the table except their unfettered greed.
So, one of the initiatives they undertook was to make a larger chunk of our business more like Amazon, the customer can make their purchases right from the website instead of having to go through their sales reps for things like generic plates and spatulas. More complicated items, such as furniture and large equipment with specs to be determined or special shipping parameters still had to go through an associate to make sure it was a successful transaction and the customer was happy. This is all well and good. Management of course sells it to us as “not having to quote a case of plates, and it frees you up to do other, more meaningful quotes.” We asked if anybody would be losing their jobs and of course the answer was “Of course not! There's always going to be plenty of work to go around.” Fast-forward to the end of 2022. We all get pulled into a meeting, and the dickhead in charge of the department said that all of our jobs would be terminated in 3 months, and that we can all reapply for the positions that have been reconstituted into their new structure, but there would be like 1/3 less positions. He actually said “Let that sink in.” like the damn meme. What an ass.
This restructure completely deleted one arm of our business, the national sales team. They work with the large nation-wide chains to help them make it. With the restructure, 2 of our big clients (who were totally satisfied with our performance up to this point) dropped us as a supplier like a hot potato – it cost the company many millions in potential annual sales. I always thought that the goal was to retain and expand your customer base, not run out some of the most profitable ones.
So special projects got reconstituted with pretty much the same people it was before. We have been working in this new structure for like 6-7 months now, and it's gotten more and more difficult, due mostly to the new way of ordering hijacking our item numbers and then we have to manually key the same items ourselves that we used to have set up by a whole team that specializes in making sure those item numbers are set up correctly. This invariably leads to more errors on our part, which makes us look bad. There are other aspects of the job that have changed and are definitely for the worse, but I suppose it's all depending on your point of view. C-suite, board members, and power investors love the new setup because it makes them gobs of money. We workers hate it because it makes it harder to do the exact same job we had before the restructure, and there are now fewer people around to do essentially the same work for the same pay.
Fast-forward to last Friday. My boss's boss calls an impromptu meeting, informing us that his boss and his boss's boss have demanded a spreadsheet be filled out immediately. This spreadsheet has all of our open orders on it. Not quotes, just the projects that are currently open in the system. The boss who is 4 tiers up from us needs this completed by end of day Monday (for their meeting on Tuesday), and we are to drop ALL OTHER WORK until it is completed. That means no more quotes, revisions, updates, or orders are to be keyed until this special spreadsheet is filled in. There are 16 data points we have to manually pull from the system per project, 5 employees on the team that do the projects, around 30-35 projects per person. My back-of-the-napkin math puts the labor cost of the 5 of us building out this spreadsheet at around $1000. The lost work time must mean that something big and bad for us is coming – there is no good reason to disrupt the flow of things when things are going well. The ripple effect on our workflow is going to be obnoxious, and there is no overtime to be had to complete this task. This is priority 1, no other considerations are a priority until it is done.
I see no scenario where this could be a positive situation. The disruption to the workflow is going to make waves, so it must be a big deal to the honchos. To me, this sounds like those soulless fuckers at the top are going to have a meeting on Tuesday to try and find ways to cut costs right now, and cutting a niche department that fulfills a specific role (and probably costs the company probably a million a year in payroll, insurance, wages, 401K contributions, etc) would be a quick way to get that instant gratification. The balance sheet will look great and those asshats will have all the information in their hands that they need to spin-down the department by handing that spreadsheet off to a few temps who will close out those projects over the next 4-5 months, and then that's it. I have a feeling that the twat in charge 4 tiers up is going to throw us under the bus in a heartbeat and the special projects department is on the chopping block.
Wish me luck!