Boehringer Ingelheim Reviews

Pros

Very clean work environment and nice facilities. The Columbus site is committed to continuous improvement. The engineering staff is knowledgeable as they tend to only hire experienced people.

Cons

Pay is a little below the market. For mechanical engineers the opportunities within the company are somewhat limited. There is a disconnect between management and hourly. A lot of things are still done using paper rather than electronic systems.

Advice to Senior Management

The Columbus site really needs to move to electronic systems for a lot of the day to day activities. Paper is ridiculously inefficient. There is a communications gap between cGMP and non-cGMP employees.

Pros

it is privately owned
ithas a good drug coming soon

Cons

layed off people after 30 years of employment and did by a phone call
give objectives that are unattainable
still following a sales model that is obsolete today

Advice to Senior Management

Get more contemporary leadership
Examine the shift in your customer base

Pros

Working with highly intelligent, accountable and caring employees!

Cons

Management obsessed with status and power games (a.k.a. bullying). A climate of fear has bred a generation of 'yes-men' and 'yes-women' at the management level. The endemic bullying culture may be the death of this once-respected company.

Advice to Senior Management

Behave with integrity and you may earn the respect of employees. Come out of your luxury ivory towers and LISTEN to employees - believe it or not, they know best.

Pros

BI is a great place because there are motivated, engaging people working there. Everyone works really well together and we all have a lot of fun on the job. The friendliness between the employees helps to foster teamwork and as a result we work faster and get more done. The company cares for its employees pretty well, so it is a very comfortable place to work. In addition, BI spends a lot of time, effort, and money to make products and processes that are environmentally friendly and efficient. Few companies are willing to take such responsibility on their own, so it is refreshing to be in an environment where this is a priority.

Cons

The work here can get a little repetative, and at the end of the day, you are still working for a big pharmaceutical company that wants to make money. This has affected a few of the devices my department has designed. For example we spent a lot of time designing something to be reusable in order to save plastic, however the company decided to make it one time use so that it would be more profitable. In addition, the location of my particular branch is in a particularly boring, small, and industrial city, which makes life outside of work less varied. However, I think the companies good qualities far outweigh the bad.

Advice to Senior Management

Make the work environment as personal as possible. Its so easy to get lost in the company when you are just one worker of 40,000. The more it feels like a community, the happier we (I at least) are to work and be there.