Essay about John Smithers at Sigtek

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CASE ANALYSIS: John Smithers at Sigtek

I. Introduction

Here is in the middle of the holiday season, a festive time when ideally everyone is celebrating, enjoying family and having fun. In anticipation of being fired from his job of three years, John Smithers is home working on his resume. John works at Sigtek, a small telecommunications company, Sigtek was in need of a change and several months earlier Sigtek set in motion a plan to launch a Total Quality Program and John had been appointed one of two site managers to run the program. Not only would this be the key to getting Sigtek set on the right path but, John felt this would be a challenging and rewarding opportunity for him and he would be able to utilize and apply some of…show more content…
Telework had plans to change how Sigtek operated; they would implement a new program, a Total Quality program that they would bring to all of its subsidiaries. The goals of the program included improving product and encourage better management practices, and to pull all of the scattered and diverse companies which Telework had acquired under a single umbrella.

II. Problems and causes:

Sigtek’s business has dropped and the company is faced with competition:

As mentioned in the introduction, due to the earlier stockpiling in the industry that had caused the sales to be artificially depressed, the company’s attempt to incorporate software into a computer system for signal handling had fallen behind schedule and for the first time Sigtek was challenged by new competitors in the industry and not to mention that the printed circuit boards that Sigtek was known for had become a commodity product, the customer focus was more on the price and delivery time, they were less concerned with quality. These factors caused Sigtek’s sales to crumble from $60 million to $400 million and the workforce was cut back from 1,000 to 800.

Sigtek is under new ownership that has plans to influence the way Sigtek currently operates:

Under previous leadership Sigtek was left alone to do its own thing. Now owned by Telwork, Sigtek’s current mode of operation will undergo change. Though
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