Jeppesen Sanderson Reviews

Pros

Stability, good benefits, work at home

Cons

Company behaves like a monopoly. Gives lip service to innovation, but fears change. Entire company is 10-15 years behind on technology. If you are not an aviation geek, you will have no one to talk to.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on core business and dump products with lower margins. Eliminate most paper products and go digital.

Pros

Dedicated to ethical business practice and friendly, smart people. Well respected in the industries they serve. The work is exceptionally interesting and has positive impact on safety and quality of life. Strong, visible commitment to continuous improvement.

Cons

Be advised that in the event staff reduction is needed, you will not receive any advance notice (at least if you are a US employee.)

Advice to Senior Management

Jeppesen is a success story, but could be even more so if it were more fully allowed to operate with Information Services metrics and processes, and not so strictly tied to the methods and metrics of Boeing (it's owner.)

Pros

- interesting and challenging work
- managers interested in their teams
- we can each make a difference

Cons

- technology not always cutting-edge
- rarely a feeling of pushing boundaries and barriers
- risks are not taken because of cost, but this ignores the long-term cost of not taking any

Advice to Senior Management

Inspire us. Not with our products, but who we want to be.

Pros

Company had amazing products. They were well planned & organized, creative, & useful.
Strong attention to detail in most product lines.
Always striving to constantly improve products.
Truly concerned about the "safety" of the aviation industry.

Cons

Different parts of the company would only see their "piece of the pie" and not how each group needed to work together for the good of the whole company.
Many departments were only concerned about how their "kingdom" could be expanded.
VPs out to "win" over other VPs ("us" versus "them" mentality within the company)

Advice to Senior Management

VPs need to hold each other accountable for what they say they will do.
Management needs to listen to employees who ask tough questions (generally they make their lives miserable). The company needs to honestly face some internal operating issues.
Give advancement opportunities based on work accomplishments/effort not solely on political connections.

Pros

Great office, good benefits, nice and friendly people, Jeppesen University Development Center. It is chance to growth here and gain some knowledge.

Cons

Any trust in senior management. Decisions are based on political instead of professional factors.
This same inefficient people over and over again at different positions or in different projects. No one even bother to check if you are good or bad, the most important is who knows you.
Jeppesen has a great values but only on paper. In practice there is a huge difference between saying and doing, which is sad.

Advice to Senior Management

Instead of changing work structure every year you shuld consider changing yourself

Pros

Good benefits and great visibility to senior leadership on a regular basis. The company is in a period of transformation and will emerge successful, but it will mean that there will be some shakeups in the near future.

Cons

The finance group is death for moving up either in the finance org or within the company. The finance leadership is ineffective and the finance director reports to the accounting director and won't go to the bathroom without getting approval first.

Pros

Jeppesen is a great place to work in many ways. The people are great, and since it's part of Boeing, the benefits are excellent. In most areas you can flex your schedule, work virtually, and most managers are pretty accommodating about time off.

Cons

The political infrastructure prevents anything from happening quickly, and no one is able to make a decision about how to proceed on anything. It seems that Jeppesen purposely makes things more difficult than they need to be, with no firm policies in place for anything and exceptions made for anyone who complains loudly enough. For example, a great deal of effort was devoted to developing a modified RUP approach for project management, complete with email blasts, workshops, and internal marketing materials circulated all over the company. But after all that work, PM's are not required to use this approach. It's just an option, and they can use any approach they like. So multiple project management methodologies are being used, with no rhyme or reason, and at the same time people complain very loudly about how difficult it is to do any kind of meaningful reporting on and analysis of project costs, as if these 2 things are unrelated.

Customers are demanding more and more digital products, and yet there is no Chief Technology Officer and instead the IT group is lumped into the same organization that holds the Quality and Facilities departments. Projects drag on for years, but since no one is ever held accountable for anything, resources continue to disappear into money pits, which leads to much angst, with upper management wondering why the company is not achieving its projected financial targets. This in turn gives rise to an annual mid-year panic where everyone is told to slash their budgets.

The CEO is a great guy who is very smart, quite people-oriented, and he genuinely cares about the company, but it doesn't seem like he can see that some key members of the senior leadership team have stagnated and are not the right people to be leading the company. Many people at the upper management level are only there because of their connections, tenure, or political savvy.

It does seem like Boeing has taken notice of this, since every senior member of the management team that has left in the past year or 2 has been replaced with a Boeing person. However, change is happening at a geological pace, and it may be too little too late.

Advice to Senior Management

Jeppesen is a great company full of people with fantastic ideas, but the political infrastructure is slowly choking off its air supply. Look at the management team, from the director level on up, and identify those who are just coasting along until retirement and/or those who have been with the company so long that they are not open to new ideas and are unwilling to take risks. Hold people accountable to their deadlines, budgets, and commitments. Jeppesen is still the market leader, but the competition is closing that gap every year. Make the necessary changes that will allow the company to be more agile and adaptable. Quit wasting time, resources, and energy on things like repeatedly reorganizing business units in the vain hope that it will make the numbers look better. The way to make the numbers look better is to run the company more efficiently, rather than reshuffling the same deck of cards over and over again.

Pros

Great people, nice tasks, overwhelming schedules. Nice environment. Not to bad compensation.
New great office. Task are sometimes boring sometimes interesting, but still give satisfaction.

Cons

Cheap solutions. Interesting employee motivational corporate strategy. Not at all adopted to rapidly changing world, strategy to keep the most important assets in company for longer time.

Advice to Senior Management

Please change strategy for people that would like to change job, because if we could compete a little bit with others people would stay.

Pros

Company provides a a good product and has some perks that a lot of other companies have done away with. There are a few good business leaders and experts in the company that contribute to its success.

Cons

The company had been successful in the past and a leader in the market. With more companies entering the market, they are losing share and not keeping pace with innovation and forward thinking. They think they are innovative with a "smoke and mirrors" marketing campaign, but they have had less than stellar performance. Senior management doesn't have a good plan to get where they need to be, but rather has become a "broken record" with the message to employees that costs must be cut. This has been an ongoing message for about three years now and gets old and demoralizing. There are constant reorganizations that set projects and products behind schedule.

The employee experience is satisfying in some departments, but others are just plain unhealthy. Procurement and human resources are two departments to definitely stay away from. The leaders will walk over anyone in their way to get what they want and make themselves look good.

Advice to Senior Management

Out with the old and in with some smart business leaders who have proven themselves at other companies. Get a clear direction and viable plan in place and stick to it. Stop the cost cutting message and put your egos aside and hire some really good leaders.

Pros

Job tasks are extremely simple and easy to complete in no time flat making you look like a rock star.
Monitoring is almost nonexistent by management

Cons

No intra-shift trust - if you take an odd shift (read not 1st shift) everyone assumes you're incompetent and won't even give you simple tasks like powering down servers.
Every building with Jeppesen is a microcosm of existence, the Denver building is in theory the headquarters but nobody ever follows the standards laid out by Denver so each building is special.

Advice to Senior Management

Look at what's going on with the people below you - utilize your night shifts. Look at the industry and try to adopt some of the standards..like patching, maintenance windows etc..Fix your communication problems, your teams don't talk to each other which leads to nobody knowing what's going on which feeds into each building being it's own stand alone special area.