Posts by ex-CAU

Re: Wow, 800 extra staff ...... view from the former front line

Hi there.

You're right - RWE npower laid off 500 of their 700 IT staff last summer and I was one of them.

Up till last September, I was a full-time IT employee (programming, development and support) at RWE npower’s main IT centre in Kingswinford, West Midlands with 20 years tenure there : there were over 200 IT development and support staff there, with the remaining 500 RWE npower IT staff split across other offices in the country.

Last summer, 500 IT staff were made compulsorily redundant by RWE, the German owners of npower, and replaced with less than 40 outsourcing contract staff from Wipro, an Indian IT outsourcing company. This left 200 IT staff out of the full-time 700 IT staff at the time : this was largely unreported, and counts on top of the 1400 business staff laid off at the end of 2013.

So they've laid off 2/3 of the IT staff (most with 20 years+ industry experience). We've all collected our redundancy cheques and gone, and the overworked 200 remaining IT staff and 40 outsourcers with little energy industry experience are running a very poor, modular SAP system. SAP is the preferred platform for RWE and many German firms, but is very inflexible and was obviously woefully incapable of coping with the comparative complexity of the UK's legislated power market as compared to the simpler German market : however, they ignored our recommendations and warnings, went ahead with the legacy system replacement and then cut costs to the bone by sacking the staff in favour of cheaper labour.

It's probably a coincidence that they are having difficulties though, what with figting with a new, unfriendly billing system and most of the experienced IT staff kicked out...

In 2011, when the Fukushima nuclear power plant got trashed by the tsunami, the green German government cancelled Germany's nuclear power industry overnight in a knee-jerk response : RWE had a lot of investment in nuclear power so they were stung massively, and have since embarked on a massive cost-cutting exercise across their group - IT is now done in Czechoslovakia, Poland and now India where it's cheaper, and permie staff are laid off in favour of outsourced labour, and computer centres and buildings (our old base in Kingswinford is just one) are being sold for building land.

Very sad, eh ?