Meantime Ungermann Bass Inc has slimmed down its European operation by closing its European headquarters in Camberley, Surrey and trimming the number of regional operations to two from three. The company said that job losses at the headquarters, which employed around 20 people, were still being negotiated, but that most people will be redeployed, with […]
Meantime Ungermann Bass Inc has slimmed down its European operation by closing its European headquarters in Camberley, Surrey and trimming the number of regional operations to two from three. The company said that job losses at the headquarters, which employed around 20 people, were still being negotiated, but that most people will be redeployed, with around six people set to leave the company. Under the old regime, Ungermann ran Northern, Central and Southern European operations which liaised with the Camberley headquarters. The company says that the UK head offics was essentially vestigial, left over from the days when it was the company’s only European presence. The new Northern operation, encompassing the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, will be run from the UK by Graham Gough, promoted to the newly created vice-presidential post. Both he and the new vice-president for the Southern region, who has yet to be named, will report to Bruce Brown, executive vice-president of Global Customer Operations. The Southern region contains the eclectic mix of Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. The move is supposedly designed to make Ungermann more responsive to its European distributors and dealers, and the company says that no jobs will be lost through the disappearance of the Central region since it was run by staff in the various country offices. Meanwhile the US side of the company is also trying to make itself leaner and fitter, by introducing electronic trading with its customers. It hopes to have at least 12 users signed up by the end of the year – presumably locking itself in nicely into the large and lucrative contracts. Already it is publishing tributes from General Electric Computer Services. The plan is to extend the scheme internationally this year. The vendor is bending over backwards to get the customers plumbed in. The system requirements are up to the user and Ungermann will design and install the equipment at the user’s end.
