ABB is looking to save $500 million per year in costs with a restructuring that will include cuts at the corporate office and a reshuffling of power into the hands of its business leaders, according to reports by Seeking Alpha (SA) and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
Along with a December sale of its power-grid unit to Hitachi, ABB will scrap country and regional structures across its other business lines, which include electrification, industrial automation, robotics, and discrete automation and motion, the WSJ notes.
As part of the restructuring, ABB gave business unit leaders ownership of products, functions, research and technology, and territories in an effort to minimize corporate interference and eliminate redundancy.
Headquarters staff had already been cut in half, but more cuts are likely as the company finds duplicated activities at the country-level offices.
ABB is hoping to retrain many employees into other open positions. It costs about €35K to retrain a worker in Germany vs. €100K to lay them off.
“We’re going towards a fully global entrepreneur model,” CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer tells the WSJ. “That’s really a massive, massive change to the operational DNA of ABB.”
According to the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, ABB announced Tuesday that it would consolidate all of its North American process gas chromatograph analyzer manufacturing to the facility in Bartlesville Industrial Park.
Nick Grant, head of ABB’s Measurement and Analytics Business Unit, said the Bartlesville plant was chosen due to its track record of innovation, efficiency, and proximity to customers.
“This decision was made to strengthen our analytical business in the North American market by better serving our customers,” Grant said. “We expect the expansion will provide new jobs to the Bartlesville area with the bulk of that hiring occurring in the first six months of 2019.”
In October, ABB announced 90 new jobs at the Bartlesville location after the decision was made to close an analytical manufacturing operation in Lewisburg, W.V. and relocate some of those positions to Bartlesville.
Bartlesville Regional Chamber of Commerce President Sherri Wilt said the impact of the new jobs will be good for the local economy.
“We are super excited to continue seeing primary job growth in Bartlesville, especially with an existing company,” Wilt said. “The trickle down impact for the Bartlesville economy with increased housing, more retail shopping and use of services in the community is a great way to start 2019.”
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