BTU Reports Q1 Net Sales Up 10% YoY

BTU outsourced its entire manufacturing process, sending many long term employees to the unemployment line.

Several years ago, BTU was purchasing some small shelf support brackets from a local manufacturer. When they discovered that the shop was not ISO certified, they discontinued purchasing from the small distributor, and instead went with an ISO certified supplier, for a considerable increase in costs.
The new ISO certified supplier was not making the supports themselves, they were purchasing them from another vendor. It was the same vendor that BTU had been buying them from in the first place.
Another brilliant management decision from a company that has bee plagued by such idiocy since the early 80's.

Were you a shareholder in BTU stock in the 90's? If so, pay PVW a visit as his home, and ask to see the giant stainless steel planters in his yard. He should be proud to show them to you, after all, you paid for them.

Het Sun reader, do you remember Peter Goebbles (sp?).
That pompous German nitwit that thought that he was born above everyone else? He wouldnt even talk to those of us of lesser importance unless he was ordered to. As far as he was concerned, he was owed that job and his salary because of who he was.
I wonder if he has figured out yet that he isnt that special ?

Oh yes, he was VERY important, lol. He was some golden boy who was brought in to "save" the company. All he did was take a whole lot of money home and save that.
I remember his wife was so very important that she initially refused to attend a company picnic, because the common man was beneath her. I will give PJvW credit for insisting she attend. She showed up, but didn't converse with any of the filthy common folk. lol
Imagine how many hard working manufacturers and assemblers got laid off so she and her Nazi leftover husband could drive their Benz. What "born-to-privilege" scum. Of course in the end, he moved onto another company without ever having made a bit of difference except to collect a salary big enough to keep 5 welders and their families on the unemployment line each year.
Congratulations Peter, you useless Euro-trash parasite.

I remeber when he flew to Stuttgart to personally accept delivery of his new Porsche, at about the same time as several people in the shop got laid off due to the desire to cut costs. He had no problem with that, because he was so very special and he was so deserving of his job and salary that it was not even a question as to who should suffer. It was either three or four of the hard working individuals who worked for a living who should make the sacrifice, or one pompous, elitist, useless, figure head administrator.
LOl. So the choice was obvious.
Ah, the European business model. Its perfect for those born into privilege.

Sun reader, remember the tombstone ....oooops I mena sign that they erected by the entrance to the parking lot ? They spent 2 years designing and planning that one.
How do you spend two years dreaming up a sign, and ending up with a short marble square with no adornment other than your company's logo?
I believe the final cost was 400 thousand.
For a rock with some initials on it.
Gee, I wonder why they had to lay off 3 guys from the paint department that year?

Yes, I remember that. Don Masson was the driving force behind that farce. Do you realize that there was actually a committee assigned to that project? Don himself told me that he worked on that for 2 years. And in the end, after all the money and resources were invested, thats what they came up with. I believe it was nick named " The Tombstone" on the very first day it was installed.

There was never anything as important to the administration of BTU as corporate culture. All the work, all the effort, all the committees, every meeting and every plan had the same primary goal, to enhance and protect corporate culture at the expense of all other things, including profits. No where on Earth did the phrase "The means have become the end" have more application than at BTU Engineering.

In the eighties and nineties BTU had a complete manufacturing facility. We could have made anything, anything at all. We had almost total fabrication capabilities already in place, we could have manufactured and sold almost anything.
How does a company in that position flag and fail, perpetually on the brink of going under year after year?
Maybe the fact that they had 900 employees and 6 vice presidents had something to do with it.
My boss who did little or nothing reported to his boss who did even less, who reported to a guy who reported to a guy who did NOTHING. Triple digit income guys who's ONLY responsibility was to report to another triple digit income guy. And they would all report to the same meetings where they topic of discussion would be "Where is all the money going?", and they would discuss how many hourly employees they would have to lay off that year so that someone could get his bonus and send his kid to private school.
Some of those people are still there, while all the shop personnel were let go a long time ago, and their jobs were outsourced mostly to Canada.
But thats understandable, we all know that those people had jobs where they "got dirty", and you don't want a building full of "those people" next to your office. In addition, the 400 or 500 shop employees took up all the good parking spaces with their foolish trucks, and made the Benz drivers walk further to get to the door. And you cant have that.

Tom the Frog wrote:

Sun reader, remember the tombstone ....oooops I mena sign that they erected by the entrance to the parking lot ? They spent 2 years designing and planning that one.
How do you spend two years dreaming up a sign, and ending up with a short marble square with no adornment other than your company's logo?
I believe the final cost was 400 thousand.
For a rock with some initials on it.
Gee, I wonder why they had to lay off 3 guys from the paint department that year?

I heard it was closer to 2oo thousand. Not that that is much less ridiculous.

"My boss who did little or nothing reported to his boss who did even less, who reported to a guy who reported to a guy who did NOTHING."
LOL So funny, so true.
Remeber the consultant they hired for hundreds of thousands of dollars to come in and figure out where all the money was going?
We laughed about that one for months. lol
I remember calling one of the guys in the next building to get a part number. My boss asked me what I was doing, and I told him that I needed this part number to complete a work order. He reviewed my paperwork, and called me into his cubicle. He told me that I could no longer call over if I needed a part number, and that there was a protocol that I needed to follow to get these numbers.
First, I had to write a rough draft of a request for the numbers. Then I would give him the rough draft. He would review it, and make any corrections he thought necessary. He would then give it to our secretary, who would type up the revised version of the rough draft. She would then submit it to me, for my approval. I would then create a final draft and submit it to my boss for approval. If ANYTHING needed to be changed, like a date or a spelling error, the whole process would start again and she would resubmit my request to my boss for his review and approval. Finally, when everything had been approved by everybody, the request would be sent next door and my friends boss would review it, and submit it to my friend for his response (the part number). Then the whole process would be repeated over on his end before it was returned to my boss for review, and then to me so that I would have the part number that I needed to finish my paperwork.
This was instead of me picking up the phone and saying
"Hey Pete, ya got that new part number for the stainless stell end caps?" And he would say ya, its 07705438." Click.
Instead of a 30 second phone call, it was 3 or 4 days, and about 4 thousand bucks. Otherwise, my boss and his boss could have just gone home and stayed there. They really didnt have anything to do, except collect a 70 thousand dollar a year salary in the 1980's.
Then another 3 or 4 guys in the shop would be denied raises on the grounds that there wasnt enough money.
There was this VP of operations named John Lyons. When we all got notified that once again the bonuses would be late AND not as much as we expected, we all voiced our disaproval. We were looking forward to going out to eat, and maybe paying an extra bill that month. He stated that he too was dissapointed, because he was going to use HIS bonus to send his kid to a better private school than the one he was going to now.
Apparently, there was a much wider gap between the amounts of our bonuses and the bonuses of the "special people", even though we had been assured emphatically that there was not. lol

Yes, some guys in the shop got annual bonuses of 6 and 8 dollars, while the people on the "management team" got thousands.
There was a foreman in the shop (who I wont name publicly) who gave his 8 dollar annual bonus back. He figured it wasnt worth cashing. lol
I myself once got an annual bonus of 12 dollars and 75 cents. I hung it up in my cubicle and left it there.
Imagine working 12 months and getting a 12 dollar bonus. Imagine the poor guys in the shop who got their 6 dollar bonuses! That 50 cents a month, lol. You might as well just rub dog crap in there eyes. That would be less insulting than a 6 dollar annual bonus.
In the mean time, Forbes listed PJ vanD's salary including stock options somewhere close to 2 million last year. Lol. And he used to complain that there was no "employee loyalty" at BTU. No shiit Paul, I wonder why. lol

Tom, remember getting blue prints and sketches for manufacturing parts to go on Peter Goebbles Porsche?
Lol. He paid much more attention to those than he did any of the legitimate parts requests.

Lol. Yes, and they had to be made right away, and they had to be just right, and blah blah blah.

And for an automobile that was supposd to be such a grat car, it certainly needed a lot of extra parts. lol

Hey, he was special, and his car was special. lol
And the rest of us were just peons.

I knew that place. You guys are making me yearn for the old days. Lol.
I remember the 6 dollar annual bonus too.

6 dollar bonuses, and a lot of promises about what they were going to do for us in the future. lol

Just in case anyone back at the office thinks we have forgotten, no, we haven't.

I was a welder at BTU for many years. I remember the twelve dollar bonuses and the constant lies.
There were several "very special" executives at BTU. They weren't special because of their abilities, they were special because they were born special. And it really really burned their asses that none of us recognized their "special heritage".
Although I would like to say that Paul J. van der Wansem was at least aware of the problem.

Iron Worker wrote:

I was a welder at BTU for many years. I remember the twelve dollar bonuses and the constant lies.
There were several "very special" executives at BTU. They weren't special because of their abilities, they were special because they were born special. And it really really burned their asses that none of us recognized their "special heritage".
Although I would like to say that Paul J. van der Wansem was at least aware of the problem.

He was aware of it, but did nothing to encourage productivity over corporate culture. The game of "Office" was always more important than the people who actually worked for a living.
The people in the shirts and ties always got first consideration.
Howie Beck really hated that. He hated the whole "Office elite" set up, and how the guys who actually made the product were looked down on.
Remember the little guy who was always dressed so perfectly? He was a small guy with a mustache and incredible suits.
We were told more than once that he was the consummate professional at his job.
But they were judging him on how he looked, not on his actual job performance.
A few years later, he was arrested at a local mall with a video camera in a bag which he would put on the floor and direct up women's skirts.
I dont remember any of the "dirty guys" in the shop getting arrested for that.
Do you remember his name?

Remember Joe Saunders chasing that cute woman on the office? He wrote her love letters and went by her house. She was very upset.
He got caught, and he got a slap on the wrist. And he had to promise to "not do it anymore ". Wow, it was quite a punishment.
Anyone from the shop would have been fired immediately.

Sun Reader wrote:

Yes, some guys in the shop got annual bonuses of 6 and 8 dollars, while the people on the "management team" got thousands.
There was a foreman in the shop (who I wont name publicly) who gave his 8 dollar annual bonus back. He figured it wasnt worth cashing. lol
I myself once got an annual bonus of 12 dollars and 75 cents. I hung it up in my cubicle and left it there.
Imagine working 12 months and getting a 12 dollar bonus. Imagine the poor guys in the shop who got their 6 dollar bonuses! That 50 cents a month, lol. You might as well just rub dog crap in there eyes. That would be less insulting than a 6 dollar annual bonus.
In the mean time, Forbes listed PJ vanD's salary including stock options somewhere close to 2 million last year. Lol. And he used to complain that there was no "employee loyalty" at BTU. No shiit Paul, I wonder why. lol

Ah yes, the six dollar ANNUAL bonus. That was classic. If you worked at BTU and you got dirty doing your job, you were definitely a second class citizen.

BTU's sole purpose is to promote corporate culture. That's why it exists. Lol