P&G Pulls Business from Erie Plastics: Who's to Blame?

who cares it\’s all over now. 200+ employees lost there jobs and who\’s to blame? Hoop Roche for his arrogance and stupidity. He saw the signs, but him and Ron Walters got out w/ their money. Don\’t think so? Ask all the people that will have bad cradit or lose their houses because one or both memebers in their family worked at EP. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year as the Roche\’s live it up and are comfortable while many others struggle to survie.

It is true about the fantasy golf leagues, 2 people in Engineering used to play 2 or 3 hours per day. As for customer relations, on a couple of occasions was reputed to have told to “the un-named customer” that they needed Erie plastics more than Erie plastics needed them. How many times can you do that until you’re shown it’s not true.

Hoop should have spent more time paying attention to what his "loyal, filled with integrity, committed" members were doing: playing fantasy golf leagues, working for other injection molders designing products on EP time and equipment, painting plaster fish statues instead of working on projects. Bad employees are still there and good honest hardworking people who depended on these others are gone. THATS the shame!

Maybe old Hoop should have spent less time blogging and more time running a better and leaner business. How come the Company still runs with less 40% of the workforce? Maybe they weren't needed? Why didn't he try to diversify sales if P&G had been threatening to leave for 3-4 years? Were all the employees pulling their weight? Sometimes bad employees have to go - a tough choice in a small town but in the end everyone will suffer.

Having worked with members at EP, I can personally vouch for the intangibles - integrity, skill sets, commitment and loyalty. The loss of P&G work, albeit unfortunate, may be a chance to re-assess operations and come back stronger.

By the way, "Pop and Shake" or whatever they call it has been around for years in China. Another closure company I worked at was evaluating the same technology 5 years ago. It's not innovative when you're a copycat.

Hoop and EP are like a lot of homegrown, pull yourself up by the bootstraps companies that thrived when times were good, but never developed true business acumen or forward thinking, long term business strategies to be able to compete in tough markets. Alot of EP upper management crowed that EP was the best injection molder in the world, and while they did do some good things, please don't be so arrogant to believe that people who literally hopped off a tractor in a cornfield have the acumen to run a world class organization. They were (are?) inefficient, disorganized, and unwilling to change (if it wasn't thought of by a Corry person, it's a bad idea!). It's easy to be successful in good times, the key is to be able to make good decisions in tough times, and they weren't capable.

The average EP member has heard all of the issues , updated weekly, for a long time. They have also heard an optimistic management team that has been encouraging them of the possibility of dodging the bullet. They just happened to be surprised when the day and the bullet came. What they haven't heard was the full measure of financial strain. Hoop made some risky choices, borrowed a lot of money and the economic situation caved in on him. Now I guess the bank is running things. I hope EP bounces back, but the situation is grave. What I can't understand is Hoop's absence. He was always willing to lecture others on "how to do it" when things went well. Now his President has suddenly retired and Hoop is missing from the scene. His absence implies his guilt, perhaps unfairly.

For the record: P&G is transferring the business within the US.