When I read comments I see
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People at the old VeritasDGC thought it was great and a company run correctly
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People at the old CGG thought it was great and a company run correctly
In practice, independently both companies were probably great.
Everyone thought the merger was a disaster.
First we use the CGG geocluster software which eventually gets remarket'ed geovation
Then as the company were unable to get this software to work correctly at the user level and it became so complicated for the seismic processor to manage we dump this and switch to tango, so to fool the clients into thinking progress has been made and the company didn't return to the 2007 version, tango is remarket'ed as geovation2 - the next great improvement.
This incompetent chopping and changing by management causes the poor geophysicist working hard to pull the cart to need to learn, multiple geocluster levels and their quirks (3100, 4000 and 5000), then geovation1, which was geocluster butchered to try at the user level to make it work like tango and finally geovation2 (which was actually tango - where Veritas was back in 2007). How many years and how much money did management waster on making these decisions. With this the display applications kept were nearly 2 decades old.
For the processing geophysicist, with all these different platforms, 4D processing in particular becomes a nightmare. An army of programmers are kept on to manage all the different aspects of each system (more overhead and contribution to the companies high costs) and the processing geophysicist then is advised by management to lie to our clients reasons as to why we cannot repeat a 4D flow. Forget the suggestion of a near perfect repeat, the software problems are such that even a single 3D processing step may be impacted by overnight changes to libraries meaning if a production run takes 3 days to complete, the first sequences of a production run can be processed differently to the mid and final sequences. If we consider these changes in a 3D sense, most are small and would go unnoticed, out of curiosity if a processor immediately rerun the same production run with identical parameters and difference this result to the original, potentially if your module libaries were update the results are different. Therefore with this level of problem how can 4D data be processed with any integrity .
In the mean time Crawley takes its eye off the business ball, the ratio of managers riding the cart increases massively compared to those pulling the cart and with this the costs CGG charge to do business rises. Around these good times, many clients complained direct to management about CGG processing costs, those pulling the cart also fed client cost comments back to management and management instead of listening and looking at why costs rose alarmingly high blamed the clients for being cheap.
As the oil industry is cyclical, eventually the seismic processing market collapses, CGG are losing money fast, around the world management and HR decide to get rid of people, but only those pulling the cart and with appalling behaviour (most notably in Crawley - see other posts in thelayoff). However those sitting on the cart (management and HR) were relatively unaffected. In trying to protect their own jobs they did not reduce the highest overhead employees who do not bring in revenue management contributed to the bankruptcy of the company.
CGG have had some brilliant processing geophysicists, unfortunately too many of these were refused management promotions as they were too good at making money and have left or surprisingly made redundant.
If I was thinking about where to place my bets during chapter 11 and how best to protect my investment;
Where does the blame lie...
What solutions can be put in place...
If the highest levels of CGG management are this incompetent, why would any investor want to give them another go.
=> A major management clear out is required at multiple levels (managers in each of the processing headquarters and at corporate level). Will those left be of caliber to save the company.
=> Or, take what money is left in assets and move on.
Originally posted at @NN8MuHy-5cqd