Westinghouse's electronic systems group, a leading maker of weapons for the Pentagon, is already suffering from the slowdown in military spending.

The company will also form a commercial systems group, which will include Kodak's copy products and graphic imaging systems.

"We use them for line busting," said Larry Lewack, president of Federated's systems group.

Mr. Hessler, 45, will remain in charge of the military systems group, corporate staff and planning.

Dave, Wayne, and the rest of the systems group grudgingly lent their portable terminals.

The measuring systems group Schenck also became part of the Dürr Group in 2000.

"I've been talking to Google all week," said Robert Kirkpatrick, lead architect of Microsoft's humanitarian systems group.

Since the 1980s the Dutch systems group has held more than 18 conferences on systems science in Amsterdam.

Likewise, the in-house systems groups responsible for mainstream data processing were often seen as unresponsive by their end users.

If Whitman is judging purely on profitability, the personal systems group (which earned $567 million on revenues of $9.6 billion) is not exactly a winner.