Digital Equipment Corp has revealed how its recently announced restructuring plan will affect the UK. The changes, first suggested in January of this year (CI No 2,340), focus on sales and marketing in the UK, which DEC considers inefficient. The new structure, labelled the Customer Value Chain, is effective from the end of this month and and will remove duplicated operations. Greater emphasis is to be given to supporting the requirements of specialist business partners, on which DEC admits it has been slack. DEC aims to lessen its dependence on large company contracts by doubling the relative value of its income from smaller, more general customers to 40% of revenues by the end of the financial year 1995 from 20% last fiscal, significantly shifting its customer base. Nine new sales branches will be opened and DECdirect, which previously competed with DEC’s business partners, is being pushed into the background, becoming a support structure for co-operation with partners; the unit, previously a vehicle for direct sales from DEC, now handles the logistics of shipment and invoicing when a sale is made with a partner. The move, which has been planned for 18 months, originally scheduled 800 job cuts from the UK as part of those announced by Vincenzo Damiani, head of DEC’s European operations, earlier this year (CI No 2,350). The final number shed here could be as low as 600.
