APL Logistics Reviews

Pros

PTO,Training, work/life balance and money for education. Also a great bonus and pay scale to keep you with the company.

Cons

Very hard to move up within the company. Management is old and not willing to share information to enable your professional growth.

Advice to Senior Management

Take time to evaluate your own employees and promote from within the company. Also increase the pay scale and bonus.

Pros

Can move to sister companies without difficulty

Cons

Hard to move up when seniority overpowers other merits

Advice to Senior Management

Need new blood eventually, don't drive them away.

Pros

Managers have the autonomy to make decisions on daily operations. No micro management and pay to hourly associates is within the market rate.

Cons

The company needs to work on getting more employees hired full time instead of utilizing 75 % of the work force as temps

Advice to Senior Management

Hire good talent, pay them good and work on retaining them by providing opportunities for growth and development. Invest in more state of the art logistics software to keep abreast in the tough 3pl arena.

Pros

international environment, great people and very interesting kind of wirk

Cons

In Europe APL Logistics struggled to grow for some unsavy management decision. therefore it kept planyin a secondary role and did not reach a market leader position

Advice to Senior Management

NOL management should have been more prone to APL Logistics and to invest is such a business and not to retreat on the shipping line business only.

Pros

No interference or hindrance from local management in the daily basic works.
Associates care about their roles and results.

Cons

Tuition reimbursement program is terrible.
Sales efforts needed to boost overall employee morale and confidence.

Advice to Senior Management

Foreign parent company should learn us 3PL market and aggressively pursue suitable partners.

Pros

There is a lot of work to be done... If you want new experiences this is the place for you.

Cons

Singapore Based Business - Out of touch with American Business practice - Watch out for the Old Boy Network

Advice to Senior Management

Less doesn't always equial more. Your people are burned out!

Pros

Great Salary, Remuneration and systems

Cons

I have had one of my worst working experience working in this company being managed by an unprofessional manager followed by a complacent next tier director. The company needs to focus on being more cross functional and communicating effectively throughout the organization.

I've encountered many interesting experiences of unprofessional behaviour, table banging, foul language abuse in the office as well as untrained people managers. The company does not have a hire and fire culture and seniority can often be abused.

Internal regional split politics reign over the organization and often enough services and performances to customers get compromised because of cultural issues and personal objectives.

Advice to Senior Management

Set KPIs for managers, actively engage people of all levels, communicate effectively, identify vision, mission & direction and create and organization targeted for growth.

Pros

Capable and open-minded manage that facilitates communication and sharing of ideas. Work-life balance is seldom a contentious issue. Many opportunities to take on responsibilities.

Cons

Poor remuneration in comparison with industry standards. Can suffer from excessive bureaucracy and administration. Often in the shadow of the bigger liner business.

Advice to Senior Management

Promote "one company" culture to build better understanding of both core and non-core business. Build a complete set of supply chain solutions rather than throw all eggs into the shipping basket.

Pros

The many areas of the international logistics that you can become involved in. In 3.5 years I have learned about EDI, rates, various cultures, managing a supply chain, multitude of processes, and systems. The opportunity is available from APLL is you have the drive.

Cons

They need improvements in their internal communcations. Being global company information tends to be held at higher levels. The intranet, The Helms has improved, but it still is not a replacement for direction communications.

Advice to Senior Management

Build cross-funtional teams to help share best practices. Too many times I have encountered someone that could benefit from my process or vis-versa.

Pros

I was never bored. I never lacked for work. I loved my co-workers. I worked with some of the best in the business! Most of them were extremely hard working, loyal, and always willing to lend a hand.

Cons

Management practices for effecting change tended to be re-organization rather than attacking the source of inefficiencies and problems. I found that my workload increased to the point where I was no longer able to perform at an optimum level. It was demoralizing and extremely depressing to feel that I could not work at an A level because I had too much to do. Due to lack of resources, I was not able to delegate any work and asking for help was deemed to be admitting to failure and incompetency.

Advice to Senior Management

Cutting IT costs by a reduction in force is rarely successful. A re-organization by itself is rarely successful if processes within the company are not examined minutely by an unbiased party. In fact, the company could have discovered what was wrong simply by asking the workers at the bottom of the food-chain. An organization that does not meter the work coming in by living and breathing a process and methodology will not be efficient no matter how many re-orgs and lay-offs it has. If sales finds that the process is not providing sufficient output, look to addressing the problem by finding out the true reason for the problem. The bottle-neck might be as simple as needing to separate customer support on an ongoing basis from customer implementation with separate budgets and resources. Similarly, software development and support should be separated and development should be done with heavy involvement and input from the user community. (This is something that was lacking at APLL). Sometimes what may look like incompetent staff is actually great staff with too much on their plates to be able to do a decent job. Laying off your subject matter experts is tantamount to shooting one's self in the foot just before a foot race. If you lose your subject matter experts and your new staff doesn't stick around, you are left with nothing.