Explorer tours Redsky offices making redundancies

Explorer, the new owner of RedSky, the construction IT software group, has been going around the country, office by office, swinging the axe and cutting the headcount.

In each office, Redsky staff have been notified of Explorer’s intentions with numerous employees being offered redundancy packages.

The tour started with a visitation to the Blackburn, Lancashire office, which houses Redsky’s largest software system, originally known as Mentor.

A second source reported 10 redundancies among the Blackburn-based staff.

The visits to Cardiff and Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire took place last week, followed by Crick, Northamptonshire on Monday.

Nottingham staff were left hanging until today.

“It’s like seeing a bullet coming in slow motion,” said the source.

Explorer is a Canadian-based IT group run by Jim McFarlane. He started the business 10 years ago. Before that, McFarlane was a contractor and a QS. Everyone in the Canadian operation works from home in a ‘virtual-type’ operation.

McFarlane is said to have told Mark Chambers, Redsky’s managing director, to institute the job cutting in Redsky.

He declined and left. Mike Aspinall has been promoted into Chambers’ former position.

Aspinall has been with the group as chief technician, managing the writing of software.One of Chambers’ concerns was the way customers would react.

McFarlane has failed to respond to Contract Journal’s various attempts to obtain a response. When asked to comment on these latest developments, Redsky said: “We can’t give you any information.”

Redsky IT, previously known as Ramesys, made a pre-tax profit of £8.2m in its latest published annual accounts. It had been in the red in the 12 months prior to that.

[Contract Journal, 7th Feburary 2007, p11]