Checkout Ltd, a privately owned company making a gross profit of some
10%-20% on a turnover of around $30m.
Later revamped by 'real''professional' managers to XN Corporation who
pissed it all away by getting rid of all the people who had made
Checkout a success.
I was part of the R&D team around the time the outsourcing began. In my
30yrs experience in the industry it was the most productive R&D dept I
have ever worked in, with world class people. R&D plus manufacturing was
outsourced to Singapore, at what eventually became enormous cost as
problems cropped up.
The old R&D dept could take an idea and have it in production within 6
weeks, with prototypes in the customers hands. For example, four of us
designed an entire POS terminal in around 3 months and had it in
production.
Of course, this was not the sole reason for the destruction of the
company, but it was a very major error. Another, probably bigger
mistake, was ignoring existing 'small' and domestic customers in the
hope that big international sales would compensate. Wrong. There were so
many mistakes with product that these never really materiualised. Good
ideas could not be implemented fast enough because of the separation of
manufacturing, R&D and management in Britain. In the 'good old days'
everyone worked in the same building. If a problem cropped up it was
being fixed within hours. That doesn't work when the three functions are
separated by thousands of miles and many time zones.
Checkout is now gone.
http://www.xncheckout.com/html/index.php
for the 'official' story.