The corporation has decided to consolidate its various branding under a single name. For the twenty years I’ve worked here, as we’ve grown both internally and by acquisition, we’ve slowly accreted additional business units and legal entities, but as a global company, that’s both awkward and not a good image, as well as incurring certain costs and disadvantages.
So the plan is to change over all the branding so that instead of Companies X, Y, and Z (and X Y and X Z and X Grommits and X Manufacturing and X Consultants and X of Indiana), it’s all (or nearly all) going to be Company X, accomplished by contract transfers and employee transfers and legal entity consolidation and all sorts of jiggery-pokery to make sure that everything is nice and neat and legal.
Except that it’s already causing all the support organizations — HR, Payroll, Accounting, IT — fits, as some of these different companies have different underlying systems for the same thing, and there’s all sorts of implications and regulatory risks for employees being on different HR systems, different payroll systems, etc. Nothing that can’t (or won’t) be worked out, but stuff that will keep us far busier with this than I suspect the executive management thought would be the case when they came up with the idea (“Just change the letterhead, how hard can it be?”). Indeed, I suspect they expected most of the problem to come from people who remain attached to the Y name or the Z identity and who have fought furious rearguard actions over the years to keep those legacy names alive.
Entertaining times ahead.
