Four years ago, Iron Age safety shoes was a company that was nummber one in thier business. With sales over 150 million dollars and a profit of /_ fifty million.
The president at that time was William Mills, the company had production of shoes in the US and prchased cheaper styles from China (as do 90% of companies here in the US). David Eckert
A graduate of Northwestern University was brought in to "help" this failing co. He brought in his own management team (every right to do so) his team was mostly friends and folks from other companies he "helped". (Paul Russo, Gary Lortie etc)
One of his first moves was to terminate the brainpower that had ran the company for years and close the headquarters in Pittsburg, PA to move it closer to his home (every right to do so, I guess)
After a year or so these "executives" totaly lost the grip of standered business practice and allowed inventory to dwindle to nothing, and believe it or not were not even billing half of the customers the employees in the field managed to keep!
The A/R dept. Got compleatly away from them, as did the payable end. Lights were turned off for non-payment, water, evicition notices were posted at stores, paychecks were late etc.
As you can see these clowns had no clue.
They spent money on updating computers (keep in mind in a year they changed hardware in the field twice)
Bought in on ORACLE as the operating system for the company to use, As with MOST companies if a operating system is changed they will run the old with the new to see if the new program is tweaked to thier needs, did not happen, turned off Legacy turned on ORACLE and the crap hit the fan as they say.
I could go on and on with the missteps these guys made but it would be a book. Long story short in January of this year they filled bankruptsy (sp?). And now in the process of selling off everyhting thru a liquidation company.
There are so many things I could have put in this report, but they are in abundence but I will monitor this site and answer as they appear.
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