Activant Solutions Reviews

Pros

Good salary and benefits with room for growth!

Cons

Lots of business unit managers have been around way too long. They don't think outside their antiquated box and seem to be coasting until death or retirement.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of the oldies who can't change.

Pros

Good work/life balance that is promoted by Sr. management. It is not a overtime every night kinda place but a 8-5 place. Most people seem to arrive after 8am and leave before 5:30pm. Good job if you have a family, another job or a hobby.

Cons

No upward career mobility because they expect you to just do your job and be happy about it. Most decisions need to go to Senior management. Salary increases only match inflation, if there are any salary increases. Most employees are long timers who have been at the company over 10 years and they don't know a different way of doing things or have different ideas. Very stifling if you want to grow in your career.

Advice to Senior Management

Management needs to provide a compelling vision for the company and not just focus on EBITDA for the next quarter. A vision where we believe and can strive for. Where is the company going? What is the future look like?

Pros

Ability to work from home.
Small Teams - great teamwork together.
Not to difficult of a job.
Decent starting pay.
Good place to coast, if you're just looking for that.

Cons

No real training.
Promises often, follow thru seldom.
No internal movement possible.
Lack of skill improvements.
Hardware not up to date, or keep up to date.
Tools out of date, and band-aid to death, new tools have issues not fixed or address old issues.
Lack of clear policy and procedures. Yet what management uses against you constantly.
Lack of management knowing how things truly work.
In 3 years 1 raise and was below inflation
Work load increases constantly with 0 compensation.
Talk of "We" and "Team" until something goes wrong then it's someone's head on the chopping block and nothing but finger pointing from management.
No true thinking out of the box. Tho asked to do so, implementation will just get your hand slapped, and if it fails then large amounts of blame are placed.
Don't rock the boat, or you'll be out the door.
Have to have that yes man mentality getting talked down too, or blamed for things not your fault, should be meet with canned responses and not the actual events that took place.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a look at your management teams. If a manager can't keep his head count filled in this economy, what does that say about that manager. It's more of a buddy system for promotions or moves in the company. I've seen this company lose a lot of great talent (especially in the last year) due to poor management decisions / thought process. Management really fail to see the big picture and don't care how their decisions affect the other workers. Layoffs are taken very lightly and without rhyme or reasons. Who you think should be let go stays, and who should stay gets let go. Needs to be some sort of better training for the managers of this company, as they tend to be very unprofessional when dealing with real situations.

Pros

Fair with life and work balance. Decent beneifits That's pretty much it...

Cons

Management is all talk and no action when it comes to sales training and other ideas that can improve how we learn and drive sales. Ideas are asked of us, or training is done, but that about it. No place to grow, moral is at an all-time low. We're made to feel like we're just lucky to have a job! We have some of the best, most talented people a sales team good possibly be. But we're held back by incompetent managers and directors and VP's that don't know how to sell in today's markets. It's a real shame, we have a great product, but we're also way behind the curve now when it comes to being a people company like we use to be when we were Triad…We all did so well as a team last year, the increased out quote and average of 15% to 20%, and now none of us are making any money. It's their way to compensate for over paying us last year.

Oh, and while we're laying people off and sitting at under 60% of quota as a team, our President and CEO just got a 20% raise in salary from $416K a year to $500K on 3/22/2011, plus an increase in bonus of the same 20%. The same goes for our VP of Development. He also go a nice fat raise in salary and bonus, but I think he deserves it...

HR Dept = Fail!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Advice to Senior Management

Let your sales team sell and do what you can to make them feel important again. These are great people and you're holding them back! Raises, raises, raises! We have not had them for years, let's make them worth while like Pervez's! Aslo, get a new HR group. They're letting things happen that most companies would fire them for!

Pros

President club rewards are great

Cons

Building is old dingy, not very clean. Training is not great

Pros

They have had the ability to attract a great level of talent/skill sets to accomodate the many fingers Activant has its' hand in. Between the different platforms and profit centers, they have attracted a high level of talent.

If you are willing to just do what you are told, you can probably work here for a long time. There are alot of opportunities to work without either alot of supervision or instruction, so you can kind of do what you want...especially if you produce or are in management's favor.

Day to day (especially when you are onsite) there isn't alot of micro-managing going on.

Cons

That might be some of the problem. There doesn't seem to be alot of management of alot of things that are pertinent to your job or satisfying the customer (which has increasingly become something that isn't much talked about vs. when I came here of wanting 100% Referenceable Customers)

Career path? There isn't one really. When I came here, the person hiring me specifically told me they wanted "fresh legs and open ideas" to take the company to the next level. That I found out was truly lip service. I told that to a Senior Sales Rep who then informed me "While we want that. it is more important that you don't rock the boat". He had a better idea of what was really wanted than I did. I am still doing the same things as I did when I started and the prospect of doing anything else here is not something I can honestly aspire to...because it just won't happen.

There isn't alot of appreciation for a great job here. That maybe fair in that you should do a good job always. But with the maturity of the software being where it is, and the miracles that are done to make customers happy, some sort of acknowledgement would go a long way.

While you aren't micro-managed in the field, there also isn't alot of care or consideration for you when you are not on-site. The amount of paperwork has increased exponentially (and just gets bigger every day) all with the key to provide management with more info to lay you off with. Which wouldn't be so bad except that it just becomes overwhelming.

If you are not in management, your job is definitely not safe. They have a tendency to lay off the workers (thereby increasing the workload), but not so much the managers.

All areas/departments (support/product development/professional services/sales) have become very defensive and adversarial. Team Activant is truly a hollow phrase that even management doesn't throw at you anymore.

Advice to Senior Management

It is hard to change a monolith...but the things you are taking pride in (many, many, many people of 20+ years) are also the things that are holding you back.

We lost a big chunk of business because of arrogance of management not listening to customers needs/wants/desires. Our competitors are taking full advantage of that. Having one platform to cover so many industries does more harm than good. PD's standard response to a change request is "we have 5,000 + people in hardlines...." rationale. But you designed the software for one industry and are just trying to make it work for all the others. Very painful for both customers and staff to implement.

Be thinking of the next product. The flagship product is just an old lady in a new dress. Our customers want and deserve more. Why aren't we getting the next generation ready now?

Be more gentle with the staff. More people than you know are looking for the exit now that the economy has seemingly turned around. Great talent will be leaving because of the way they have been treated (pay raises...er lack of, vacation policy...why California employees can keep their vacation days...others can't?? training...I think it is a foreign word here.).

I think your eyes would open wide if there were 360 reviews. Let new blood in. This isn't the NFL where you just keep changing the same coaches from team to team (ie. dept to dept). Let someone new in and give true opportunities to grow with a realistic career path.

Pros

Family comes first. Benefits are decent.

Cons

Management is more worried with EBIDA management than customer service or employee morale.

Advice to Senior Management

Start appreciating the employees you do have and start focusing on what the customer tells you about customer service and what the employees tell you.

Pros

Activant is the type of place to get some experience if you’re starting your career.

Many nice coworkers and dedicated managers.

Basic benefits.

Cons

Below average compensation.

It is very noticeable to employees and customers that the left hand rarely knows what the right hand is doing. Customer communication isn’t much better, unless we’re selling them something.

I’m amazed at how many talented people have quit Activant during the recession. Sadly, many more employees are holding out and eager to leave when the job market improves.

Most older employees aren’t fooled by the forward looking hype from execs. At least lately they haven’t been misleading employees with IPO rhetoric.

It's the type of company where, year in and year out, like a broken record, you have to say that things can only get better from here. Many employees continue to hope Activant will sell the business unit.

From what I can tell, Activant’s business strategy is quite simple = copy the industry leaders as cheap as possible, and expect the same results.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus more on organic growth, no acquisitions.
Ditch any thoughts to offshore staff for now, we already have more nuts than a fruitcake on our plate.
Invest more in building a culture of innovation.

Pros

Activant provides opportunities to their sales team to be extremely successful. The company recently has attempted to go back to its roots of customer support and service and this has been a positive move that has been recognized by its customers.

Cons

Activant is a sales driven company that easily loses its bearings related to existing customers. The next sale is more important than keeping its existing customers satisfied.

Advice to Senior Management

There are many seasoned employees that are stifled by a lack of opportunity to get their voice heard. Senior management lacks sustained focus on initiatives, hopping from one project to another before they allow results to show.

Pros

Like so may others, I loved the people I worked with. My direct supervisor was great to work with as well as my peers.

Cons

I felt I could trust very little of what came from upper management. I do not have a problem with the bottom line being part of the decision making equation, but when it appears to be the only consideration I think there is a problem.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate better from the top down. Allow for better opportunity for advancement within the company. My manager had to approve an internal move but I did not feel that would ever happen. So I felt trapped.