JDA Software Reviews in Phoenix, AZ Area

Pros

good pay, good salary. good work ethics.

Cons

lately they are outsourcing lot of development jobs to india.

Pros

Fast paced environment with opportunity for growth if you know the right people. Leader in retail software. Company is always profitable, so, little chance of layoffs.

Cons

Employees reluctant to share any knowledge or information about the product or anything else.

Advice to Senior Management

Start leveraging the talents of your employees.

Pros

CEO capable of making hard decisions

Cons

company thinks they want to innovate but does not know how

Advice to Senior Management

5 year strategy, fix internal operations, balance onshore off shore strategy

Pros

very great tax department to work for

Cons

Not very much variety in the work I did

Advice to Senior Management

There is nothing that I can offer to management at this company, I was only an intern for the summer.

Pros

A few great core products, mostly acquired over the years (except good ol' MMS).
Opportunities to work on hard business problems.
A few great people scattered about in the mix to work with.
You learn a bunch working there, wearing many hats as reqiured.
Doing reasonably well despite the tough new economy.
Above par pay and benefits for this economy.

Cons

Good ol' boys club reigns supreme. CEO generally feared.
Insufficient innovation value from within; M&A is primary new innovation value conduit.
Long history of thinly-integrated products requiring repeated field rework and R&D disruption.
Insufficient product investments for customer maintenance fees charged.
Doing reasonably well because of repeated layoffs and massive new India presence.
Major move to India further destroyed staff morale, adding significant risk and product doldrums
Million$ lost to repeated big idea investments that went nowhere, all swept under a rug.

Advice to Senior Management

For those still at JDA: When giving advice to JDA leadership, it is important to position it in a way that if it is very good, senior management will think they thought of it and adopt it as their own, forgetting its source. At best, an associate might get to see his ideas adopted and flourish, but don't expect much more than that, such as the ability to re-train for a new position (as some were promised) when yours goes to a much less expensive, much more junior person overseas. C'est la guerre.

Pros

There aren't many software companies left in the Phoenix area. In general, the pay, vacation, and other perks were good for the area (though not so great when compared to the software giants of the west coast).

Most people have families and the typical workday ends at 5:30pm. No, really! I used to stay late til 7:30pm or so and it would be me, the security guard, and the 24 hour customer support staff.

Cons

The strangest part of working at JDA is dealing with people that come from a retail background and try to squish into software dev. There is very little overlap. Explaining best practices to retail people is not an easy task. In general, I found the workforce to be undertrained and underbrained. That sounds harsh, but if you are used to working with the best and the brightest, you may find it a) tough or b) awesome to be the big fish in the little pond.

In addition, because of the frequent layoffs and contractions to appease stockholders, people are fiercly protective of their positions. Most promotions are because of who you know, not how you did.

Management is bottomline driven and doesn't look out much further than 12 months. Many holes in tthe software catalog are filled by acquisitions - when I left there were over 50 legacy software packages. This has resulted in an unholy mess of code.

Advice to Senior Management

It just feels like the upper management has no idea how a software company is supposed to work. This is communicated to employees with constant layoffs and offshoring, unclear company goals, frequent acquistions for no other reason than to appease stockholders, and no particular grand scheme for the company in the coming years. In retail, maybe it's more appropriate to look no more than a season ahead - but in software, you need a multi-year plan.

Even more damning -- JDA does not know its end user. And it is pretty uninterested in the end user experience (after all, he or she is likely to make minimum wage and move on to a new job within months). All the software planning is about bells and whistles to appeal to the software buyer.

You need to pick a path, set a far goal and work towards it for 18 months without an acquistion or layoff. Move some of your executive staff offshore and work with some real software people. Bring actual end users in to meet your developers and software designers. Expect more of your employees. Break up the boy's club.

Pros

JDA provides the stability needed in today's economy. They are very fiscally aware (almost to a fault) and ensure the success of the company. They provide good benefits and compensation that on-par with the industry standards. They have products that no one else in the industry has and can make a huge difference for a retailer.

Cons

Politics do play a role with the company. The "squeaky wheel gets the grease" is definitely true--in some ways, that's how things get done. Also, because they are so fiscally conscious, it could be considered "penny pinching". The location off shore has also demoralized a number of departments as those departments have suffered job and people relocations.

Advice to Senior Management

The dollar is important, but moving jobs offshore should not be the primary way to accomplish that end. In the end, an analysis of the overall profitability of the company would be in order to find out if the time spent on training and rework was truly worth the expenditure.

Pros

Great people and excellent opportunities for growth. Really seems to be an emphasis on team work which makes work a lot more rewarding. Compensation appears to be very fair and benefits package as good as any place I've worked. Company is growing at a reasonable rate and there seems to be lots of opportunities for JDA to continue to acquire new business with a portfolio of products that is second to none. Company does a great job of trying to balance work and life.

Cons

History of layoffs seems to be always in the back of people's minds, though this is an industry hazard.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep the communication lines open and keep everyone informed of what's going on.

Pros

The company has a good benefits package that includes vacation, health benefits, a great 401k plan, an amazing wellness program, great corporate discounts, flexible work environment, allows people to tele commute, great place to learn

Cons

They tend to downsize often to show profits

Advice to Senior Management

Buying other companies is not necessarily the greatest way to increase the company performance

Pros

Challenging atmosphere and competent people. There are not a lot of software companies to choose from in the Phoenix area, and JDA tends to attract the best in the valley.

Cons

Little room for promotion--the company is very layered without much merit based promotion. It is also a place where focus and direction tends to change on a regular basis, and the software development and delivery suffers because of that.

Advice to Senior Management

Institute merit based promotions, and review existing management to see who is performing and where changes could be made.