Pepsi Loses IT Staff In Spin-Off Fear

Competitors are snapping up uneasy employees

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

cores of IT employees are leaving PepsiCo's $20 billion restaurant operations amid uncertainty about the unit's spin-off next month. Among the defectors is CIO Honorio Padron, brought in last August to put together the unit's IT strategy.

The business, which includes 30,000 Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut restaurants worldwide, will be spun off as Tricon Global Restaurants Inc. on Oct. 6. Dozens of IT employees have already been poached by other employers, capitalizing on the uncertainty about Tricon's IT strategy and about whether employees will b e required to relocate from Wichita, Kan., and other Pepsi locations to Tricon's headquarters in Louisville, Ky.

Sources say Padron is resigning partly because he would have to move from Dallas to Louisville. The fate of the IT standardization strategy Padron created late last year, to integrate diverse platforms used by Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell (IW, Dec. 9, 1996, p. 20), is unknown.

One of the other big IT employers in Wichita, Koch Industries Inc.-an oil and financial services company whose name is pronounced "Coke"-has been quick to snap up PepsiCo IT staff. "Koch has recruited about 20 of our IT employees since the beginning of the year," says Nils Lommerin, senior director of human resources for the Pepsi unit's IT operations in Wichita. Koch "is taking advantage of the uncertainty some of the IT people are feeling," he says.

Wichita isn't the only PepsiCo IT center that's losing people, sources say. In recent weeks, cosmetics maker Mary Kay Inc. has been "flooded with resumŽs from p eople at Pepsi," says Trey Bradley, CIO at Mary Kay, which is based in Dallas, near PepsiCo's IT facilities.

Lommerin says PepsiCo's restaurant business has largely managed to cope with the loss of IT staff. "It's been expensive," he says, "but we've been able to fill most of the vacancies through hiring and relocating people from other cities, college recruitment, promotions, and other means."

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