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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.
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.
I am a professional chess and Go player. Fortunately for me I am safe from automation.
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?
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!
How much talent does it take to sell diabetes-inducing sugar water anyway? "Automation" is is another word for "contractors in India".
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Sounds like a method of getting rid of all the old people working there, then in a year or two will say they failed and hire young people. Sounds like a good plan to avoid all those pesky US regulations.
You underrate the skills required by management. A good manager is nearly as rare as a good plumber. Both exist.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think you underestimate how much mid-level busywork can get automated in most businesses. In my own organization, I can think of a good half-dozen people who are going to be missing half their workload once their managers decide to get on the automation train.
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. Even if we just get them access to the one system and a script to change the data format and upload it into the other system, we're chopping a day and a half of work down to about 15 minutes of work. (Ideally we'd just link the systems, but that's a bit bigger project.)
There are piles of things like this in every organization.
It's quite possible that there are a few visionary people now in management positions who know full-well the rot and waste of time within the organization, and who are going to try to slim it down. Depending on how thoughtful they are, this could be a massive cost savings with minimal impact to the day-to-day operations.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
but they really mean that their jobs are safe
RTFA. These are white collar "corporate" jobs being eliminated. They aren't laying off workers at the bottling plants.
You want a Universal Basic Income? Buy shares in PepsiCo. [...] UBI for shareholders of the ETF.
Do you find yourself confused by the world "universal"?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
'training' their robots
It's R2D2's brother, H-1B.
Have gnu, will travel.
Maybe they're automating the layoff process?
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
People aren't drinking as much soda pop anymore. The sugar stuff is bad for you with lots of calories. The diet stuff is turning out to be even worse for weight and blood sugar. Flavored waters are now the thing. I'm sure pepsi has some skin in that game, too, but not as much as they do traditional soda pop.