Barco announced a restructuring plan intended to align the organization with changing market demands and growth opportunities, while enhancing the company’s long-term profitability.
This comprehensive plan addresses specific aspects of Barco’s organizational structure and effectiveness, particularly in the areas of product management and commercial and service delivery processes. The plan also includes the reinvestment of cost efficiencies toward certain growth initiatives, innovation and further business expansion in target geographies.
“Since launching our ‘Focus to Perform’ program in 2016, Barco has made measurable and steady progress primarily by rationalizing the business portfolio and part of its manufacturing footprint, and by implementing value engineering initiatives. With this plan, we take the next step in our ‘Focus to Perform’ program and embrace Barco’s future as a successful hardware, software and services company,” said Jan De Witte, Chief Executive Officer of Barco.
Over the course of 2019, the program might affect around 240 positions across the organization, 55 of which are based in Belgium. Production worker positions will not be impacted. Additionally, Barco expects to reduce its indirect expense level by approximately €20 million by 2020. As a result, Barco expects to record a restructuring charge in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year.
To implement the plan, Barco intends to advance and deploy the following initiatives:
- Group software development departments into one global software development structure;
- Rebalance marketing, service delivery and project management capabilities for stronger regional empowerment;
- Realign and strengthen marketing and product management capabilities to ensure end-to-end responsibility for delivering solutions encompassing software, hardware and services;
- Streamline organization and simplify decision making, while eliminating functional duplications across the organization; and
- Rationalize external spend and practices for procurement of external services.