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We now have it confirmed from two– count ’em two– inside sources close to the story familiar the matter who can’t speak publicly for fear of getting their asses canned: GM is shutting off voicemail for certain employees and contractors. One anoymous person who wishes to remain anonymous but really does exist (or so he thinks) estimates that about half of those working in GM’s RenCen HQ will be affected, mostly in manufacturing. “A lot of it had to do with redundacies between office phones and GM provided smart phones.” Although, it should be said, not all.
What manufacturing at the RenCen? I thought it was all suits, bean counters, and spinmeisters there. Manufacturing boffins are typically at Warren and the plants.
Ford did away with desk phones a while ago. Not tough to do when you are never at your desk (as many development engineers are).
this is getting stupid
Years ago, most of the GM engineers were given a cell phone. And they still had a desk phone. I remembering mentioning the fact that a desk phone seemed redundant.
So today they still have the cell phone and a desk phone. But no voicemail. But they are still paying for that desk phone. Which they never answer because they are not usually at their deks.
Yep, seems like a GM move to me.
I would hope all the desk phones are on a VoIP system so aside from one-time handset cost and user license cost on their VoIP system it’s “free”.
Voicemail just eats up storage space (but really not much). I don’t see this as a cost-cutting move, but rather just streamlining things to reduce confusion.
I really hate having a desk phone (w/ voicemail), a work cell phone (w/ voicemail, e-mail, etc), my personal cell phone (w/ voicemail, my work e-mail, etc). It gets annoying when someone sees you walking around campus and asks if you got their voicemail –you have to ask which number they called you on, and most people know one or the other and aren’t aware that there are two direct lines for each person in the company.
I imagine that at the huge scale of GM an annoyance like that would be a major communications barrier.
Maybe they should cut power to the assembly lines where they make the worst selling models. And if they buy Chrysler, there’s all sorts of power they could cut.
They’re cutting voice mail at Milford Proving Grounds also.
If they were smart, they would have installed VoIP on their LAN and used their existing workstation as full feature telephones, kinda like Skype.
Of course that assumes that their LAN could handle the bandwidth hit. But good routers and LAN engineers could have tuned it to prevent someone’s downloading massive files from impacting the VoIP system.
I would guess that GM pays EDS a management fee per line or per vm box, hence the savings.