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There are many companies that have suffered closures this year, some bigger than others but what are the reasons behind this?

Woolworths PLC

Well as a former member of the group I must say that I know exactly why the company closed and part of it was indeed down to the poor fixed asset accounting that the company had been doing. Woolies (as the public knew them by) were a huge company and they failed because of the idiots running it. The directors knew fully well that they were a failing business and they had over a year to sort this out and they seemed to do nothing. This obviously failed and I must say a lot of this was to do with the thick headed directors not being able to manage their assets.

XL

A lot of this was of course down to the fuel prices that had been steadily on the rise in the late part of 2008 and the other was that XL were not filling their planes. Planes of course were the primary asset of the company therefore they were not managing their assets in the correct way. Another reason why XL failed as a business is because a lot of the people travelling with them had thought twice about taking a holiday because of the recession.

MFI

This again can be blamed on many different things. One of the big reasons is that they really couldn't give a damn about the aftercare for their customer which turned out to be a big issue. Most of the offers that these companies had were often lies and most of the things they said were included were not at all. As well as this they didn’t seem to recognise IKEA as a real competitor and of course they didn’t do well on the asset management front.

So the advice here? Get some asset tracking in there and make sure your inventory management software is perfect!