Specialized Systems Inc. Unveils Reorganization

Less than a week after announcing plans to merge during the next two years with a Hong Kong company, Specialized Systems Inc. on Thursday unveiled a reorganization designed to eliminate an unprofitable product line and emphasize sales of new high-tech products.

Concurrently, two SSI board members have resigned, two new directors have been elected and the firm’s former chairman and chief executive has been rehired as vice president and chief financial officer.

The reorganization has been unfolding for more than two months, although company officials waited until Thursday to announce the changes.

SSI has sold nearly all of the assets of its unprofitable Datatel subsidiary, which marketed the Executel office-communications system, to Los Angeles-based Raven Industries, according to Stephen J. Nemergut, chairman and president of SSI, which makes telecommunications devices for the deaf.

In the next year, SSI expects a cash profit from the sale of about $125,000, although the price of the transaction--which includes notes payable over a two-year period--was not disclosed.

The company is also negotiating with Plantronics, a telephone equipment supplier, to buy all available inventory and test equipment for Vu-Phone, the device for the deaf that has been sold primarily to phone companies.

Late last year, SSI purchased Applied Marketing Inc., a drug and grocery products distributor headed by Nemergut.

Two longtime board members, Ronald Benincasa and N. Russell Walden, resigned, while two new directors, Russell W. Colgate and George J. Coleman, have been elected.

Benincasa helped spin off SSI’s Sonic hearing centers subsidiary in 1983. Walden is group vice president at San Diego-based Intermark Inc.

Meanwhile, former SSI Chairman and Chief Executive Edward A. Wachter has been rehired as vice president and chief financial officer.