Word: carping
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Today such skepticism on the Street, if far from gone, is tempered by pleasant surprise. A year after Carp launched the restructuring, Kodak has lined up a respectable portfolio of increasingly lucrative digital products and services. The company, based in Rochester, N.Y., lost $12 million in the last quarter of 2004, but that was largely because of restructuring costs. Meanwhile, its revenues actually climbed 3%, to $3.8 billion, in that period--the 16% decline in Kodak's traditional film business offset by a 40% surge from its digital sales and services. Yet there remain ample reasons for doubt...
...digital technologies, going back to a 1976 digital-camera prototype. More recently, in 2001 it introduced the first of a line in digital cameras named EasyShare that have grown in popularity and today command a leading share of the market, ahead of Sony, according to International Data Corp. Carp began preparing the ground for Kodak's transformation soon after he took over in 2000, placing people from digitally dominant companies like General Electric and Lexmark International into top management posts. After his first COO, Patricia Russo, left to head up Lucent, he replaced her in April 2003 with Antonio Perez...
...from a very rich, very successful company, [Kodak's management] was sloppier than we wanted it to be," says Perez. "We were looking for accountability. We organized the company so it was very clear who was responsible for what." Perez also had to find the right people to--as Carp puts it--"teach" Kodak about the brave new world it was entering. Many have come from outside--including seven of the 10 most recently appointed senior managers--though Carp himself joined Kodak as a statistical analyst 34 years...
...when the little yellow box reached the customer; today such cycle times are half as long. So far, says Brown, KOS has saved "tens of millions of dollars worth of capital and hundreds of millions in inventory" and has contributed "hundreds of millions in productivity." Impressed by such stats, Carp asked Brown in late 2003 to inject KOS into Kodak's entire corporate plumbing, from human-resources management to product development to the products themselves. "It's an entire management philosophy," says Brown...
...helping put some of the shine back on Kodak's prospects, but its hometown, Rochester, is hurting. It has borne the brunt of the company's downsizing, as Carp has sought cheaper manufacturing abroad. Most of the company's digital cameras are now made in China. In Rochester's northwest, the 2,200-acre Kodak Park, once the hub of Kodak's industrial operations, is full of vacant lots and demolished buildings. At its peak in 1982, the firm--once called the Great Yellow Father--employed more than 60,000 people in the city and had long been famous...