Activant Solutions Reviews

Pros

The employees within Activant made it a good place to be. As long as you worked with Directors and below, you had a good chance of success and satisfaction. Geographic location was also a consideration. I lived closed to the office, thus it was worth staying.

Cons

Poor management skills. VP and Sr VP titles handed out based on longevity vs. capabilities. Most VP level executives are simply waiting for their tour of duty to end. No feeling of responsibility toward employees under them. The world is theirs -- we simply live in it.

Advice to Senior Management

Build something. Stop hanging on. Offer visions and strategies, so employees know where the ship is headed. Come to terms with the fact that you are not the smartest people in the company, and let others contribute.

Pros

Great pay, wonderful customers and peers.

Cons

Mangement does not listen to employees. Lots of lay offs of well seasoned employees. If you have been there for 15 years or more you might not have a job tomorrow. No room to move up the latter.

Advice to Senior Management

Ask employees what matters to them. Are there alternatives to lay offs like salary reduction, furlough days. Stop laying off the people who have the exsperience and drive to move the company forward. Share information and care about your employees. All you are focusing is the bottom line and everyone feels like they are just a dollar figure on a spread sheet.

Pros

I like my co-workers and exposure to some newer technology. Plus I can work remotely when I need to on short notice.

Cons

To make numbers they cut employees, demand that their vacation time is used by Oct 1st and invests ZERO money in the support staff. Middle Management tows the same line and insinuates that you are lucky to have a job.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus more on the employees and stop insinuating that we are lucky to have a job. At a great company, the employees would already feel lucky to work there not that it's better than being on unemployment.

Pros

Co-workers were some of the best people I have ever worked with. The benefits package and salary were highly competetive. Always had a flexible work schedule with no trouble getting time off.

Cons

Absolutely no formal training! My job was complex and it was virtually impossible for anyone to have the skill set and knowledge to complete the required job tasks. Learning was accomplished by asking my co-workers (and interupting their work) many times over and over through the course of a two year span of time. After two years, I pretty much knew what I was doing but still had to bother my colleages from time to time.

Management would only give raises to the elite employees...The chosen ones!!! All other employees (about 80% of the total work force) received no raises for several years.

Management never valued the employees. As stated earlier, no training or raises were provided. Also, great employees were either laid off or fired. There was never any recognition for a job well done and I never knew if I was doing a good job or not. There was very little effective communication between management and employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Value your employees!!! Quit focusing solely on the profit margin and create a positive work environment. Laying off good employees year after year to increase the bottom line will bite you on the rear end!

Pros

Large organization. Good people overall as employees.

Cons

Management is too focused on EBITDA and not enough attention is paid to growing the company. Too many platforms to manage effectively. Sr. Management seems a little too shortsighted and overcontrolling.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire good people and trust them to make decisions in their departments. Focus on growing the company's top-line and the EBITDA will follow. Lead by example.

Pros

Excellent work/life balance policies, including work from home options. Attractive benefits package. Competitive salaries and fair employee review process. High degree of intercommunication across departments. Division staff genuinely interested in helping colleagues achieve results.

Cons

Company upper management focused way too much on short-term numbers. Constant layoffs undermined staff morale. Almost all of the colleagues I knew while there have since been laid off or left the company, many with less favorable things to say about upper management. The division I worked for had been acquired by Activant the summer before I was hired, and many longtime staff lamented the decline in family feeling under the new management.

Advice to Senior Management

Profits are the byproduct, not the product. Stick by your staff when things get rough instead of letting them go to make your numbers, and they will reward you with results both in bad times and good.

Pros

Exposure to entire operations
Good people (Not Senior Management)

Cons

Stagnation
benefits are inadequate
antiquated systems
No thought out plans just shoot from the hip

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of our CEO who is just incompetent, CFO who is just a political individual and the rest who don't know how to manage people and have no strategic plan except for "lets lay off" to make our numbers.

Pros

If you can find the proper manager to work for you can have a positive work experience and it would be a great place to work.
If you make a low salary you can stay there a long time cause they tend to leave you alone if you don't cost to much.
Ability to work remote for some departments/divisions.

Cons

To many chiefs
Training/education is pretty sparse but the expectation is great
Raises / promotions are pretty small if your lucky to get one, typically it doesn't even cover the cost of inflation.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your people. Stop taking the attitude you should be happy to work here because we are great compared to working the fry line.

Pros

The people. Good experience working with small business owners.

Cons

Watching management work is like watching a bucket of crabs. Instead of focusing on working together to get out of the bucket they focus of pulling each other down to make themselves look better.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of the entrenched middle management that look to make the other managers look bad and blame frontline managers and supervisors for poor results and issues. Middle management is anyone not the president or a frontline manager.....

Pros

Great customers, colleagues are great to work with

Cons

Poor management decisions have bad effects on the customers, management thinks that we have very satisfied customers, but they are wrong. Pervez was named CEO of the new Epicor- Epicor employees should get ready for your career to go down the drain. All the other posts on this company's thread are very much what I and so many others feel each and every day.

Outdated products, no organizational structure, no standard operating procedures, micro management, development doesn't listen to the customer's needs and satisfy them- they do what they want.

Advice to Senior Management

The only thing we can all pray for is that Apax Partners (the investment firm that bought Activant & Epicor to combine them) will see this site and take note that the Activant side of this company is hanging by a thread. If we loose too many more people we are at risk of implosion. Our customers are NOT happy and it seems to get worse daily.