A big bargain for DX this year. They got everyone back to work for $100-$150 less/month then in 2012.
Thank you MR. I bet you're still getting your bonus and stock options.
Only stock options I have are chicken or beef for my kids lunch.

A crummy company to work for.
I hear DPC, although low pay, was a much better place to be at than this dump. A shame they sold it.

Hourly rate? "Back in the day" everyone at DPC was salaried (i.e. exempt), down to the lowest QC and Production tech. People were made to work tons of unpaid overtime. Ask Mila.

what nightmare?

LA people have the highest average hourly rate across DX site, consider how many hours per day they actually work to collect their paycheck... for the past five years.

when all other sites worry about layoff, LA don't, because they were already survivors. Nobody would shed a tear if they let go tomorrow.

OMG !!! The nightmare from hell thread has been revived.

*Grabs motion sickness bag*

Good to see good old LA folks are still healthy and sound. Happy new year and merry 2013.

Let's kick off 2013 by bringing this thread to the top!

Can you believe that DPC (LA) still lives on?

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No one here wants LA people to die. On the other hand, you've had years to make arrangements for your future and that's alot more than most people get when they get laid off. You've known for years that your jobs were going to be terminated sooner or later. If you stayed around just for a package, then you should be happy that it will be coming soon, but now you have to find another job. If you had been looking for one over these past years, you wouldn't be 'dying' now. Each person at DPC knew the score and made his or her own personal decision on whether to leave or stay to the bitter end.

We are sympathetic to all of those who have or will lose their jobs and to the complete elimination of DPC/LA. But it is harder to have much sympathy for those who chose to stay and now find themselves approaching their own financial cliff. I hope you can all understand the distinction.

"How's everyone in LA doing? Just an old friend and co-worker checking. Siemens is turning up the heat now."

Yes, they're dying! Is this what you like to see?

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How's everyone in LA doing? Just an old friend and co-worker checking. Siemens is turning up the heat now.

Relative to population, the Germans far and away are the greatest contributors to science and technology, out pacing the rest of Europe, Japan, and yes the USA. And not just since WWII. The Germans have been this way all the way back to the Dark Ages and before that even. Call them anything you want, and in many ways they deserve the derisive name calling, but dumb certainly does not fit. Arrogant and foolish, yes, but the best of us all make blunders. But dumb and stupid should be the last words to use to describe the German people. The rest of the world could be better described with these words.............by.......guess who............thats right, the Germans.

Many said that the Russians actually got the best of the German rocket scientists. The Germans also were superior in producing military airplanes for a while, but failed to understand that the capacity of the American production facilities and population far outweighed any technical superiority. Even today the term 'over-engineered' is associated with German design.

As for World War I, Germany had a number of allies that included the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy (for a while), Turkey, and Japan to some extent. The so-called Central Axis did 'win' against Russia, a country crippled by internal decay, strife and revolution. In the West no one really almost won. It was like two fighters trading punches until one finally fell down. The Central Axis simply ran out of men and resources first in a war of attrition.

Germany first took on the entire world and gave it a very good shot the first time around, even if they could not really take on the ENTIRE world as it turned out.
Second time around with Japan and Italy, they again almost won the war.........with a collective population (all three Axis players)that was dwarfed by the Allies. A ton of technology was produced by the "dumb" Germans including rocket powerplants and guidance systems. The top German scientist (von Braun) was in charge of NASA's space program all the way up to the 1960's- 1970's.
Pretty stupid fella this German rocket scientist, yeah?

It's not nice to criticize a poster just because he spelt a word wrongly.

So the German has to go through not one but two wars to learn a simple lesson that killing millions of people is bad, I wonder how smart they can be? You should have some more self-respect and higher IQ than them.

learnt?

Wars have nothing to do with this, and even if they did, they'd have learnt to take every tiny detail into account.

Enjoy your redundancy.

"I have no doubt that every German involved has more native intelligence than you do."

For a country started AND lost two wars, I disagree.

"Stop overthinking the LA drama. It's the level of intelligence that matters....."

I have no doubt that every German involved has more native intelligence than you do. Having said that, I would agree that German arrogance got them into trouble. Even very intelligent people make dumb decisions because high intelligence often breeds overconfidence. Conversely, lower intelligence often breeds ignorance. As for your comments, only a lower intelligence level that leads to ignorance could have made you make the comments you posted.

Stop overthinking the LA drama. It's the level of intelligence that matters.

If you ask an adult to close a door, it may take a second;
a preschooler, half minute;
a monkey, one minute;
Siemens DX, well, six years and counting.

*Hands out diazepam and pacifiers*

WHY DON"T YOU TEACH SIEMENS TO REALIZE THAT?

The cold-hearted reality is that, over time, the field population of Immulites will decline. As that happens, fixed costs will eat into profitability to a point where Siemens will discontinue Immulite altogether. Right now, LA is a fixed cost and the longer that it exists, the sooner the time will come when Siemens will shut the whole thing down. You don't need to be a finance person (I'm not) to understand that basic concept. Somehow, Siemens hasn't realized that either or have been unable to eliminate the need for LA. In either case, the fact remains that LA's existence is an headwind for the longevity of Immulite.

Ed and his fans can clean up themselves now. What a joke.

"I don't know Ed, but it sounds like that after 5 years Siemens has sent a no-nonsense, no excuses man to clean up the mess in LA. Whatever secrets LA has been keeping in order to keep them necessary to the supply chain will be pried out of them. 5 years?? Who says the Germans have no patience? They obvious did and have used it all up."

LA may be open for another 5 years! Angry? Frustrated? No, heart-broken!

Yep. Last post was months ago. Still intense interest.

DX, DPC and Deuce still live! Who would have thunk?!

I somewhat agree with what you said, though I'm in LA. It seems like you really believe that it's LA's failure that brings down DX. Then my question is why Siemens lays off people at other sites. In fact they let go even earlier than LA. Always remember as employees at DX, when we suck, we suck together.

I don't know Ed, but it sounds like that after 5 years Siemens has sent a no-nonsense, no excuses man to clean up the mess in LA. Whatever secrets LA has been keeping in order to keep them necessary to the supply chain will be pried out of them. 5 years?? Who says the Germans have no patience? They obvious did and have used it all up.

Get ready to see how the rest of the diagnostics business works wherein highly skilled, high paid R&D transfers products completely to the lower skilled and lower paid manufacturing and service people. Getting this job done and done quickly will take a big economic burden off of Siemens and it's long overdue. Those still in LA should consider themselves lucky in at least one way. I can't imagine another company that would have decided to shut a part of their business down and then let it take 5 years. Imagine if it had taken only 2 years as it should have and most of you would be been laid off just as the recession was at its worst rather than in a few more months when things are starting to get a bit better. While you can bemoan the loss of DPC as an entity and a culture, in many ways you got alot better deal than most people in your situation.

Two major changes LA is now dealing with:
1)The one day layoff schedule within dX turned out, once again, to be one huge lie.
US has an additional 600-800 layoffs to go through by next year.
2)Llanberis is now running LA.
DPC created Llanberis many years ago under the Z's.
Never thought they'd be running the show now.

What I do know is this: Ed Farrel will go through LA with a sledgehammer making changes as he see's necessary.
He turned Llanberis around but the mentality of the employee's is totally different.
This should be very interesting to watch.

I vote to stay with this thread. The 100 post limit no longer appears relevant.

HELLO EVERYONE

We definitely went over the 100 posts pretty fast this time.
So much is going on now.
Llanberis now controls LA! How strange is that. When will the 600-800 US layoffs take place?

Please continue posting at:
DPC-LA: 2012 DEUCE XXXII

These are strange times but sharing and staying informed here is our only option. DX just keeps sinking down the black money hole.

THANKS EVERYONE

So, a forward looking post.

Fate of former DPC: all that's left will be transferred to Llandberris (sp?), probably as fast as possible. When DX feels this task is complete, the remainder of former DPC employees will either be transferred or let go. I've heard the CrossPoint facility is very nice, so likely Siemens Real Estate will put it on the market and try to re-coup some money, there.

Fate of former Dade-Behring: this thread isn't too much about them, so I don't have enough information to hypothesize. Was their main location Deerfield, IL? When JRA and DQ left, and MR came and moved HQ to Tarrytown, did this weaken this group?

Fate of former Bayer: this thread isn't too much about them, either. Were they mainly based in Tarrytown, and do they have more momentum since this is now the HQ of DX?

Where does Glasgow fit in? Someone needs to draw a picture of the parts of DX...

Why humans can be brilliant: Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, ZZ, etc., and all the wonderful inventions and innovation they brought to the world.

Why humans can be insane: definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. Per MBA education, 80% of Mergers and Acquisitions fail, and they also teach that the main reason is the inability to continue and integrate the culture of the company.

Why there's hope for humans: someone or some company will find a recipe to approve the above 80% statistic. Since it's all about culture integration, take a fresh approach and try something new. Hire a top-notch group of Cultural Anthropologists and see what they can come up with! Business consulting firms just aren't cutting it. Probably be a heck of a lot cheaper, too! The lack of trying fresh approaches on this problem is also hindered by the fact that this problem needs to be solved by BIG COMPANIES - where for the most part it's commodity (read group) thinking that remains supreme. We need a "Jack Welch" of Siemens - turn this big tanker to a forward looking direction! One thing is for certain, if some company figures out the "recipe", they'll have a huge competitive advantage until the others benchmark it and catch up.

I've brought up the subject of magic, or in plain English the DPC culture that was responsible for the company's success. The last post wants a forward looking view. I'm sorry but I don't see how there could be any "forward" w/ whatever is left of DPC's Immulite line. The primary inventive souls of the company are long gone and the innovation and quality can no longer match what was routine for the old company. Even most of the 2nd and 3rd string players are long gone, and none of the other divisions seem capable or wanting to advance Immulite issues. The line has no direction other than downwards it is sad to say. By foolishly disrupting the company culture, Siemens threw away the companies most valuable asset and severed away the future. There is no hope for Immulite except to retain as much of the customer base as possible and eke out some continued reagent sales or tranfer them to other platforms. None of the options has any real potential for Siemens to get back any significant percentage of the original sales price paid for DPC (~$1.9 billion). It was, is and will be a terrible situation for all involved in this tragic waste. Great job Siemens!

Previous post was backwards looking (which is fine and interesting), but how about a forward looking statement? Will work at DPC be transferred out and then shutdown, and if so, what's the timeline? What can current management at DX do to improve financial numbers - continue cost cutting measures and start developing new product lines, and for the later, what should the product lines be? Do they have any talent left to develop new product lines? Should they sell off parts of the business, should they buy more? Did they miss the boat on Immulite (or whatever the name of the company Roche bought)? Will they try yet another management change? Is the DX image "blown", and do the sales teams have any positive moral left to sell their products?

Reading the posts here, makes it sound like DX is a top-heavy pyramid ready to cave in and crush itself. Is this true? And if true, what can Siemens do after it's crushed? Write off their $12B investment to "experience building"? Can Siemens absorb such a loss? Will the world even miss Siemens DX?

Siemens may have destroyed a great company, but I would submit that the company was, for all purposes, destroyed the moment the Z's signed their names to the deal. And that was simply the final nail in the coffin. DPC would not have been the first to undergo major changes when the founding mother and father departed. And I'm sure that many at DPC would easily accept the terms 'mother and father' when talking about the and major force behind what DPC was. I think it was fairly clear that MZ just wasn't into it in the same way. To him it was a business; to Sigi and Marilyn it was their life and blood and sweat. Once they left it was never going to be the same. MZ saw a way to get out with a nice pile of cash and Siemens saw DPC as a short term piece in their long term puzzle. The odds that MZ could have gotten a comparable price from an independent investment group or from a large company that would have left DPC intact in terms of culture were zero. At the time of the sale, the 'magic', esprit de corps, teamwork, team spirt, or whatever you want to call it was pretty much doomed.

I've posted many times about the magic at DPC and always got hammered for those comments but the last several days of postings have been very civil, smart, and well written. Maybe my comments were better recieved when it was clearer that I was talking about the total package that is needed for the "magic"; great employees, management that gives anyone dedicated to the company's cause respect, strong clear leadership and leaders that work at least as hard as they expect their employees to work. As I pointed out the bigwigs at DPC also didn't play the "Queen Bee Game" where the top positions were full of outlandish perks and social gatherings that clearly favored the haves and the have nots. They just didn't have many perks I was aware of beyond the usual business meetings. Even the offices were very Spartan. I think all of this stuff furthers company culture w/o any artificial push from rah, rah speeches. When your leaders are doing more and trying harder than you are, it is much more likely that you will make greater efforts yourself and enjoy your daily rituals much more despite the greater efforts needed! That's when the magic follows. I wasn't trying to ascert that DPC employees were all organically better. We were better because the entire culture made us better and it made DPC's leaders better, and therefore the company was better. The magic doesn't come from experience, superior intelligence, pHD degrees, better dressed or better spoken employees, it comes from the synergy that comes together when all of this happens at the same time for a long enough period and with the right group of individuals. It does not happen nearly often enough in industry. I also think that diagnostics is not a business that lends itself to the type of integration that Siemens aspired to. If one takes 3 digital high tech companies and try the same integration, I think the chances are much better for success. Why? Any computer/ software engineer can adapt immediately to another companies devices since the way the technology works travels well as everyone is basically on the same page. Not so with diagnostics. Its much more comparable to cooking at an elite level. You give 10 cooks the same recipe and you will get ten dishes that may taste similar, but none will be exactly alike and a few will be terrible and a few will be delightful. I think we can all relate to this example, and I think this was a huge issue not addressed by the Siemens elite because of their arrogance. They were in over their heads and didn't even know it. Too bad they had to destroy a great company in order to get religion.

Where are the wise old ants in Siemens????
END QUOTE

They left with the last layoff.

I've read most of your posts here. I can tell you DX doesn't not work on those models.
It has already been run into the ground.
As far as LA is concerned, Ed Farrel, will finish the job.
He already scheduled his people to come to LA and see what the problems are and transfer things back to Llanberis.

He also just had a layoff of 31 at his Site and is decreasing his manufacturing lead time in half. What do you think he'll be doing to the sleepyheads in LA?
DX also still has 600-800 layoffs scheduled as well through next year.

On the imaging side, Siemens (and its competitors, they benchmark each other like crazy so no one ever really stands out), most of the profit is actually in the service contracts. They make minimal, and at times NO profit on the sale of the systems, nor in the first year during the warranty period. Then service contracts kick in, and most customers must buy them. Priced usually around 10% of cost of scanner. So, Imaging Service organizations are very profitable and command a fair amount of power. I would guess this may be similar in the DX business, but instead of service contracts your profit comes from consumables, whose lifecycle is probably quite fast relative to a yearly service contract.

DX is definitely a different model, but it doesn't sound like rocket science. That said, Siemens loves its process harmonization and if your sales cycles and service contracts are too from the norm, well... best explained by an analogy from the movie A Bugs Life. All the ants are in a line, heading back to the ant hill with food, when a leaf falls and breaks their line. Some of the ants can no longer see the ants in front of them and they panic. Older ants are standing by, calm down the panicked ants, and bravely lead them around the leaf until they can see the ant line again.

Where are the wise old ants in Siemens????

What you say is fair and logical. However, your examples are ones in which Siemens added to an existing business with products that were similar in nature. In the case of diagnostics, one sells (or leases) a fairly large, expensive piece of equipment that might have a use life of 7-10 years and, in that respect, DX is similar to imaging. However, the big difference is that during the lifetime of the instrument, Siemens is making reagents, calibrators, controls and ancillary materials for their instrument and, for most diagnostics companies, most of the profit is in this aftermarket. Furthermore, diagnostics requires that more tests inevitably get added to the menu. These differences may sound trivial, but they affect the entire business model and in many ways the personnel requiremnts. In diagnostics, sales people are usually following up with existing customers to get them to buy more different tests on their Siemens instruments, both chemistry and engineering manufacturing R&D people are needed for example. It may take Siemens longer to get its hands around this new business model as they try to integrate DX into the rest of their organization ... and the clock is ticking. For those who remain at the end of the year, we can only hope you are right and that Siemens will turn things around.

Would it be fair to say that Siemens makes the vast majority of its money on its organically grown businesses, or at least businesses they purchased in Germany, Austria and Switzerland? If this premise is true, can they not see the pattern and stick with what their good at???

Just FYI - their "horses" in the imaging business are CT (based in Germany), MRI (based in Germany) and interventional X-ray (called AX, based in Germany). For ultrasound they acquired an American company (Acuson), probably 8 yrs ago or so. This acquisition plus their current ultrasound business made them number 1 in market share. Last I heard, probably two years ago, they were number 4... Molecular Imaging has been their American acquisition success story. Bought Nuclear Chicago for the gamma camera business, probably 20 years ago, and then in 2005 bought the PET part in Tennessee - bought a joint venture they had started about 10 years earlier. So, PET part was "eased" into Siemens - and guess what, it's been profitable and a much less bumpy ride.

A related business, in radiation therapy, they bought a California company, dismantled it, moved it to Germany, and last December announced they are canceling the main project and shutting down this business. They will play in this market by being the "imaging partner of choice".

Rocket science? I think not! Take the time to understand the culture of the company you're buying, either by having company being in the SAME culture of parent company, or start with joint venture and ease small company into big company. If it's not going well, don't buy it! The value of companies lies in the culture and the EMPLOYEES, not in the numbers on spreadsheets, which probably have a heck of a lot of "innovation" behind it!

It's more of adaptive (American) vs stubborn (German), rather than big vs small. Think GE-run NBC, which is at lowest rating among major networks. But it never turned out as disastrous as Siemens-run DX.

In-house workshops, consultants and other training can be helpful. A good analogy would be in sports. All the courses and training in the world cannot make a sports hero out of someone with no talent, but training and good coaching can take raw talent and turn it into something exceptional.

As far as corporate culture is concerned, the biggest problem is that most companies have one that they (e.g, management and tradition) feel is the best and that all new employees, be they new hires or new acquires, will recognize as truly superior and adapt to automatically. This is logical since most large companies are successful by one measure or another and why would anyone argue with success? Siemens make money in imaging; Siemens makes money with trains; Siemens makes money in electrical products. So why would anyone at Siemens believe that the same culture that made them successful in the past not be applicable to DX? The fact that diagnostics is a completely diffeent kind of business compared to their existing businesses is irrelevant to Siemens, as it was to Bayer and it looks like the results are quite the same for each. It is truly amazing to watch Siemens follow almost the same path as Bayer did after Bayer acquired Miles and Technicon.

"It just amazes me that companies do no get the importance of this kind of company culture."
END QUOTE

I think they get it, and want it, but just can't figure out how to MAKE it happen. It's the rare leader or coach who has this ability to build this culture - the Vince Lomarbi's, Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln's, etc. How often do individuals like these come along? And try as you might, it never works to emulate a great leader - you just have to BE one. Think of all the money companies spend on developing leaders - the workshops, outside consultants and coaches, does it *really* pay off?

Does it make sense to think of the upper management of large corporations more like Venture Capitalists? Persons who know very little about the domain of the business, and who have very little personal contact and interest in the employees? If so, then the best bet for employees like me is to present and "sell" projects to management. I just expected my management to be "leaders", not investors, and come up with the vision and strategic plans. If this is the reality, then I need to change my expectations which will change my actions. It's also hard to work for a group of persons who really don't care that much about me from a personal or even professional standpoint.

Thanks for pointing out that big companies CAN be a great place to work and make you feel like you are making a difference. I don't think I'm being fair to Siemens, either. I think there are groups within Siemens that have that culture, too. We only get to see such a small part of it. I guess we all have to keep searching until we find what we're looking for, and when we do find it, enjoy it while we've got it.