Dematic Employee Review

I have been working at Dematic full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – I've been with the company for 8 years starting out in Sydney, Australia and have been at our American HQ in Grand Rapids for a year now and there are definite pro's for working at Dematic. Working as an engineer in a sales support role has a lot of variety in design work, and I have been given the opportunity to try out other positions for a week or two between peak workloads. The company pays well and will definitely look after you if you consider taking a position temporarily abroad (Australia, China, UK, Germany, for example where we have Regional HQs). The after hours social interaction is great too and there are a lot of opportunities to meet new people via the Grand Rapids Sports and Social Club, lunching in the cafeteria on site, working out in the fitness centre, or just socialising with work friends for happy hour. The company responds to employee suggestions proactively and does some great work with local charities. People are willing to help if you have questions (which you will have a lot of when you first start out).

Cons – With the size of the company, there is a large hierarchy, which while it gives you a lot of growth opportunities, it does have a little bit of a disconnect from top to bottom, but i have seen some definite improvements with this over time. Some deadlines with customers can get ridiculous and you get stressed out occasionally, but that is really the joys of full-time work.

Advice to Senior Management – Make yourself visual to the employees by working in some of the groups from time to time and seeing the stresses, the pro's and con's to processes, and then build up visions, strategies, targets and processes from that. (eg: go out commissioning, build some conveyor in the shop, go on the odd sales call to customers during planning and design phases). I've heard this has done a lot for A) employee morale (as it looks like management cares about every role in the company and you can get direct feedback), B) process improvement (because with a company this large, change is easier to be made when it comes from the top down) and C) Gives management better experience to back up the numbers and feedback that you get through standard lines of communication. Back in Sydney office we had an issue with silos between different groups and I can see a bit of that happening here (even between different middle managers). Sydney seems to have worked through a majority of those issues there and it made it an easier working environment. In the end we are all one big team and we can all make each others lives easier, it's all for the better.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend