PepsiCo Is Laying Off Corporate Employees As the Company Commits To 'Relentlessly Automating' (businessinsider.com)

PepsiCo is kicking off a four-year restructuring plan that is expected to cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in severance pay. "This week, PepsiCo employees in offices including Plano, Texas, and the company's headquarters in Purchase, New York, were alerted that they are being laid off," reports Business Insider, citing two people directly impacted by the layoffs.

The latest job cuts come after CFO Hugh Johnston told CNBC that the company plans to lay off workers in positions that can be automated. CEO Ramon Laguarta said on Friday that PepsiCo is "relentlessly automating and merging the best of our optimized business models with the best new thinking and technologies." From a report: This week, PepsiCo employees in offices including Plano, Texas, and the company's headquarters in Purchase, New York, were alerted that they are being laid off, according to two people who were directly impacted by the layoffs. These two workers were granted anonymity in order to speak frankly without risking professional ramifications. At least some of the workers who were alerted about layoffs will continue to work at PepsiCo until late April as they train their replacements in the coming weeks, the two workers told Business Insider.

By PepsiCo's own estimates, the company's layoffs are expected to be a multimillion-dollar project in 2019. Last Friday, PepsiCo announced in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it is expected to incur $2.5 billion in pretax restructuring costs through 2023, with 70% of charges linked to severance and other employee costs. The company is also planning to close factories, with an additional 15% tied to plant closures and "related actions." Roughly $800 million of the $2.5 billion is expected to impact 2019 results, in addition to the $138 million that was included in 2018 results, the company said in the SEC filing.

Comments

Wait a second...

[alzoron]

At least some of the workers who were alerted about layoffs will continue to work at PepsiCo until late April as they train their replacements in the coming weeks

Are they training the robots?

Re:Wait a second...

[quantaman]

Automation isn't necessarily all or nothing. Automation tools might allow a team of ten experienced and expensive workers to be replaced with a team of three uneducated minimum-wage workers. Those three will still need a bit of training.

I think that's backwards. The jobs eliminated by automation are typically the simpler and more repetitive ones, but even though those tasks are now automated you still need people around who understand those tasks well enough to ensure the automation is working properly.

So you're more likely to replace ten uneducated minimum-wage workers with three experienced and expensive workers.

If there is automation-related training of replacements I suspect they're training the technicians who know how to maintain the automated process with the tasks that are being automated.

Of course, this is /. so I'm mostly speculating and don't have a lot of actual experience.

I retrained

[Anonymous Coward]

After I aged out of my engineering job, I knocked off a MD. it was four years of memorization. All it takes is understanding of basic science.

I wish I just went directly into medicine. I'd be rich and it would have a lot easier than engineering. My colleague has an undergrad in art. The other in accounting!

Re: I retrained

[Anonymous Coward]

Should we tell him that there will be a time when we lower H1B visa restrictions and import docs who have been educated to greater levels and at a tiny fraction of the cost he has, so are far more inexpensive to employ?

That's why there is such a cry in the tech sector about "lack of interest" in tech related fields in the US by students...when there actually isn't. It's just cheaper to get those workers from abroad. Workers who have grown up and been educated in economies with much lower costs of living and education.

The US could be pumping out 100% stem students (and lowering costs for employers through an over supply of workers) and still NOT reach the level of cheapness that tech sector empoyers who are crying for few restrictions on immigration. And they aren't even the least bit ashamed by it. They build a company in the US do to the legal and trade framework doing so gives them access to, then turn right the feck around and hire from abroad and laugh all the way to the bank, knowing US consumers will still likely buy their products. Like idiots.

Re:Looking forward...

[grep -v '.*' *]

Their products cause zero obesity. Fuckheads drinking it like water causes obesity. But, we all know libs don't accept personal responsibility for anything...

HEY! I may be fat but I'm NOT a lib -- them's fightin' words! Water is good for ice and mixed drink "rocks", nothing more, I'll have you know. I only drink 2L of *Coke* a day, the stores hate to see me when it's dollar day, the limits they put on are for ME. (I asked one store about their purchase limit, and they mentioned that it wasn't for commercial use. I didn't ask what that was, I just got a 6-pack of 2Ls and went on my merry way. For a few hours.) Still trying to lose weight, but those pizza boxes always get in the way. Buying 30 x 2L within a few days is not uncommon, that gets me thru to the next sale. Of if there's a drought I manage to suffer thru it. (My precious...)

When I was a teenager, I noticed that after exercising for 30+ minutes and drank a coke, I came out even. So I switched to diet drinks and haven't looked back. A friend of mine (Hi Jimmy at Novell) always nagged me that it would turn into formaldehyde; I always rebuffed that I was saving the undertaker time and they should be paying me for it. We agreed to disagree. I'm going to see the doctor Tuesday about other things, I'll ask him. (And he'll say yes and so I'll drown my sorrows with some added cherries in my drink.)

Next thing you know you'll be calling them "sodas." Pshaw, neophytes. I may be fat, but not from Cokes. And NEVER Pepsi, the world's worst drink -- although Tab does give it a run for the money. Coke's just all around better: Try it, you'll like it.

Re:Bonuses

[vux984]

One person spends a good day a week doing data entry into one system of data we already have in another system. Then they spend another half day dealing with the data entry errors causing problems down the line.

LMAO. You are so right.

On the other hand, it's not so simple a problem to solve; i've seen it tried. Sure it sounds like its a few lines of script... but inevitably there's a bunch of domain knowledge and data transformations being applied; and you end up 100k into developer time and it's still not quite right because the process was poorly documented, the consultants are money grubbing assholes, and the people with the information to fix it are the ones being fired so they're not exactly happy to help assuming they stuck around. Then it turns out you need a data feed from yet another system...

And the whole thing needs a highly technically skilled babysitter now to watch the logs and fix the problems in the automated process. He only needs 30 minutes a day instead of 1.5 days to do the data shunt, but he costs 10x as much; so the return on investment is taking a lot longer, especially after you factor the initial dev cost.

  And then one morning the data format from one of the feeds changes without announcement from the producer (at the very least another department you don't have any control over... or often a customer, vendor, other 3rd party; and the whole thing implodes... and the consultants are billing doubletime to try and fix it. :p

Re:My job can't be automated

[C0C0C0]

99.9% of wannabe football players never make it to the NFL. The vast majority earn nothing.

... and those that do have an average career of 3 years, and significant risk of permanent brain damage.