RM more redundancies on the cards

[free780]

http://theregister.co.uk/2016/11/24/jingle_bells_rm_tells_some_staff_to_go_away/

[Alan_Carpenter]

Hi,

 

A presentation about our proposed changes was held across a number of our offices yesterday morning. Those who were unable to attend in person - such as those who were visiting customers in schools - were asked to join sessions via Skype. As one of the team that delivered these presentations, we carefully planned to ensure that all of our people received the correct information and next steps from our management team.

 

We have now entered a process of consultation to discuss proposals and will be working closely to support any staff affected and assist them in finding alternative employment. If any opportunities exist elsewhere within the Group, we will also aim to redeploy staff if possible.

 

Regards,

 

Alan

 

Alan Carpenter

Creative & Marketing Director

RM Education

[Zoom7000]

Wow... So glad I left that company. In the 4 years I was there, I was put at risk 2 times. Horrible feeling and a lot of friends lost their jobs. Sad to see such a huge fall from grace and it's the hard workers at the bottom that suffer.

[zag]

Apparently they still have their Indian call center!

[strawberry]

So, Can't box shift anymore, Don't need support staff anymore.... What will RM be selling in a year?. I'm off to cash in my 6%!.

[psydii]

The BSF programme encouraged suppliers to massively massive over-reach their technical ability and their loading of risk.

 

The cancellation of BSF and the subsequent financial environment in schools hit education infrastructure and services suppliers hard. The final contracts must be coming to an end over the next 12-18 months and very few are likely to be renewing (maybe 40% probably less?). That RM is still in business and remains able to present good ideas as commercially viable products and services is a testament to a highly capable management team. It is tough for those whose roles are being reviewed but for those who will be left, the company will be better placed to survive until funding streams in education improve.

[3s-gtech]

I pity the techs that were TUPE'd in via all of this BSF stuff, only to now be in a situation where they're looking for work again. By the looks of the job vacancies sections, there are plenty of these roles back in schools again so what a waste of time that was.

[Zoom7000]

The BSF programme encouraged suppliers to massively massive over-reach their technical ability and their loading of risk.

 

The cancellation of BSF and the subsequent financial environment in schools hit education infrastructure and services suppliers hard. The final contracts must be coming to an end over the next 12-18 months and very few are likely to be renewing (maybe 40% probably less?). That RM is still in business and remains able to present good ideas as commercially viable products and services is a testament to a highly capable management team. It is tough for those whose roles are being reviewed but for those who will be left, the company will be better placed to survive until funding streams in education improve.

 

Yes, but the trouble is that had been said on the previous 2 occasions also and yet here we are a 3rd time. What's the saying about 3 strikes...?

[psydii]

Well they could have just made everyone redundant and sold all their assets, returning the capital raised + reserves to shareholders back in 2012/13. I guess their management team thought and evidently continue to think that there is value in the business as a going concern.

 

Until the economic situation / government funding priorities change it is going to be tough. This probably won't be the last round of changes they make. I'm not sure they have any competition of similar size to compare to, perhaps Capita, but Capita is a much larger group and so restructures in their educational IT Hardware and Services division(s) wouldn't make the news.

[Edu-IT]

Alan Carpenter

Creative & Marketing Director

RM Education

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Seems an odd choice of person to deliver a presentation on redundancy. I'd expect it to be HR.

[psydii]

"One of the team..."

In general marketing covers a huge range of business activities, the public face of which might be the Sales team, the Seminars, BETT, trade shows, and popping up in online forums to make official statements.

 

Internally marketing can also cover choosing which products services and even business units will go forward to the market (that's us, the potential procurers of their services and products).

 

So it makes sense that they would form a key element of briefing the troops as the the future strategy of the business.

 

(I should add I have no knowledge of roles and responsibilities within RM, but I do have an appreciation how marketing in well run organisations is much more than just advertising and sales)

[Nixon77]

It's horrible people have to lose their jobs, but I'm not surprised.

 

RM was too expensive and the systems (at least up to four or so years ago when I used it) were very poor.

 

They used to charge stupid prices for simple tasks. It drove many schools away.

[Lonix]

I pity the techs that were TUPE'd in via all of this BSF stuff, only to now be in a situation where they're looking for work again. By the looks of the job vacancies sections, there are plenty of these roles back in schools again so what a waste of time that was.

Absolutely, I was almost in that situation and was going to look else where. There was talk that the School at the time would just carry on employing us.

As for RM, certainly can't be easy... budgets being squeezed... less replacements and more maintenance needed ASAP to get things working....

 

BSF cancellation stopped me going else where. Just another bright idea that was half hearted, cost a fortune and no one cared. One of the many reasons this nation has financial trouble throwing money at something... I was involved in the prep of our School and I wasn't impressed at the idea of just throwing (no joke) money at kit that didn't need to be replaced. We had almost 1000 PCs at the time site wide and the majority of it was fine, good spec and just needed SSDs at some point. To be told they will all be replaced at roughly £400 a pop.... you can guess I certainly wasn't impressed. We even started to create a wish list of what we'd always dreamed of (all over kill) and it was all effectively agreed to..... BSF another situation like the NHS had some years ago.. throw money at it and hope for the best....

[HarryMonkey]

I just hope it's not their UK based helpdesk that's going as the Indian call centre is absolutely hopeless in my experience.

[dry]

Sad news. I know of a few techies who were TUPE'd across as part of BSF but have since (having been employed by RM officially for ~6 years) transferred back to the school.

 

From the sounds of it, it's head office/management staff that this is affecting. I do wonder if the next round will be techies on the floor that'll face the cut.

[jertsy]

I dont think they have ever fully recovered from the initial launch of CC4 as it wasnt ready at the time IMO. I think up until that point RM had solid systems (albeit expensive) and now the finanicial climate and the end of BSF has just compounded it

[Zammo]

Not sure it is getting better either:

 

Job cuts, falling sales and now a mega pension deficit at RM ? The Register

 

:/

[strawberry]

Shares up around 20% today and talk of a takeover/Merger.

[Edu-IT]

Any companies named?

[rad]

Where do youo see this information? Merge with who?

[HarryMonkey]

Purchase of Education & Care

 

Connect Group to sell education & care business to RM for $70 million | Reuters

[dry]

Shares up around 20% today and talk of a takeover/Merger.

Have had RM in my fantasy trading portfolio for a while now so I'm a happy bunny!

[PotNoodleTech]

It is very sad to see a company go like this. RM had two major problems.

 

1. The value added by Connect was steadily eroding over time due to Microsoft putting more and more features into Windows and Server. Back in the Connect 2 days - managing a Win NT network manually was a complete nightmare, Connect 2 was outstanding in that it let you automate many processes which had simply never been automated before, from automated workstation building, user creation, user account/workstation/grouping, print allocation, to rolling out software centrally. All of this was way, WAAAAAy ahead of its time and allowed Network Managers/Techs to be massively more time efficient. Back in 2002 I used to chuckle at my poor friends who worked in industry and were still manually installing Windows off a CD and spending hours installing software on each Windows 95 PC, at the few clicks of the mouse (and one floppy disk) I could build a PC from scratch and allocate 30 different items of software to it in 2-3 hours whilst I went off and fixed some printers or something. This was outstanding software.

 

Then we had Connect 3 which was still very good and still did many automated things which were difficult to achieve in a native Win200 active directory setup. But Active directory itself started to erode RM Connect's usefulness and this happened more and more with each MS release. Now windows 2016 is awesomely epic - there is zero need for RM Connect software on top.

 

I never went CC4 because Windows had become so automatable, and there were so man third party tools out there, that really it didn't make financial sense. So that was the end of connect. RM went from having an outstanding product to one you could do without if times were tight, and times were tight in many schools.

 

2. RM Went for the "all eggs in one basket" approach and restructured their entire business when Building Schools for the Future (& Later Academies) came along. The politicians sold them a pup, and now it's biting them in the backside really badly. The sad thing is to a certain extent, when they went after BSF as the cost of looking after their own existing RM/Connect customers which ended up making issue#1 ever worse and caused even more schools to leave them.

 

I still have my "RM Certified Technician" and "RM Certified Network Manager" badges

[localzuk]

Purchase of Education & Care

Connect Group to sell education & care business to RM for $70 million | Reuters

 

Wow, Connect Group is renamed Smiths News. They own the Consortium, so basically RM just bought The Consortium. I imagine TTS and Consortium will end up as one brand?

[HarryMonkey]

Wow, Connect Group is renamed Smiths News. They own the Consortium, so basically RM just bought The Consortium. I imagine TTS and Consortium will end up as one brand?

 

They haven't bought Connect Group, they've bought the Education & Care part of the Connect group.

 

https://www.connectgroupplc.com/operating-divisions/connect-education-and-care

 

EDIT: Then again I might be wrong about that.

 

https://www.connectgroupplc.com/operating-divisions/connect-education-and-care/companies

Edited February 7, 2017 by HarryMonkey