RedPrairie Reviews

Pros

Lots of exposure to various technologies allows for good growth. If you put in the time there is no reason not to be satisfied.

Cons

At times competent workers have larger work loads without necessary compensation. This has caused some of the older more experienced people to leave.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay better to keep experienced employees around, they are worth the cost. Also recognize when an individual is contributing to your projects and compensate accordingly.

Pros

The upper management seems to know what they want done and when. There are services to help employees get errands or other home tasks done when they are too busy at work. The office is clean and workstations are relatively comfortable and spacious. The coffee is free. The work culture is relatively relaxed for developers and the "business casual" dress code is, in reality, very flexible.

Cons

Lower management communication with new interns is nearly non-existent. There is no training program, and they won't even train you how to use their software product AS A USER. The source code is massive and complex, and would take years to fully comprehend by yourself, which you will be as a new employee. The learning environment is extremely frustrating and the attitude from "full timers" seems to be that interns are not worth their time, and interns should struggle to learn the code as the "full timers" probably did. When you're stuck and want nothing more than to be productive, be ready to receive inadequate responses and even be ignored when you ask questions. Pay was $12 an hour and there's no chance to increase that until graduation (when being hired full-time is not guaranteed).

Advice to Senior Management

Create a training program for your software development interns, starting with an introduction to the relevant software package on a user level. Try to ensure that interns are made to feel welcome to ask questions by their direct reports. If an employee is going to be managing an intern or other subordinates, train them in leadership.

Pros

They have an open concept in their work environment. The work setting is very laid back and friendly.

Cons

Their compensation is very cheap. They mentioned performance bonuses as part of their compensation, but management was always cutting the maximum payout in half.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to offer better compensation.

Pros

Opportunity to work with people that have some great skill sets.
Liberal time out / time off policies.
Ability to work independently.

Cons

You are expected to work as much as required or whatever it takes.
Be available to anyone that may decide to call on you after hours.
No overtime.
No pager compensation.
Repetitive tasks that are both manual and redundant.
Little to no dialog exist between middle management and workers

Advice to Senior Management

C_o_m_m_u_n_i_c_a_t_e! Right or wrong say something, say it often.
Let people know that something is about to change or something may not work properly.
Be open and H_O_N_E_S_T!

Send a email if for no other reason than to ask how a person is doing...

Pros

Ability to work remotely for most service positions, good internal network, decent benefits. Customers divided into business units by industry for services.

Cons

Difficult to find resources to staff on projects that have experience with RedPrairie Software, most resources have limited experience and don't have much industry knowledge. Customer Satisfaction is pretty poor very few customer projects are implemented on time, most projects are delayed. Expected to work long hours and weekends, 50 to 60 hrs per week normal sometime more. Support desk very poor, issues still referred back to project team after being turned over to support, more like an answering service than a help desk. Measured by billable hours, and little concern to customer satisfaction.

Advice to Senior Management

Invest in employee work life balance and customer satisfaction, get rid of quarterly reviews everybody just does it once and uses the same reviews over again for the next quarter. Plus you have to do yearly reviews, end up doing 5 reviews per year for 1 person, nobody puts time into it.

Pros

Opportunity for professional growth. High expectations from management and peers. Relaxed environment. Agile methodologies. Modern technologies and tools. Management by objective. Constantly trying to improve people, processes, and products. Free soft drinks, tea, and coffee. Company parties are fun and often. Growing number of people who take pride in their work. Energized 6hr focused work day -- 20% time free to split between personal growth, research, and administrative tasks. Extremely flexible work schedules in general.

Cons

Interaction with end users is often restricted by customer policies, making research difficult. Internal communication is often lacking in quantity and quality. Some of the middle, upper, and executive management are at their level of incompetence and/or not genuine, also many of them are out of touch with their employees. Some others have just been at the company too long and no longer pay attention to other companies or their skill sets. At the time of writing, sales was still occasionally committing engineering to line items without their knowledge, but its improving.

Advice to Senior Management

Read modern management books. Get back in touch with your employees' day-to-day work. Help your workers remove regular frustrations. Be genuine.

Pros

-Lots of opportunities for advancement in the services department
-Despite being mid sized RedPrairie is a very international company
-Competitive starting salaries for recent grads
-Solid benefits(401k match, health and dental, tuition reimbursement, average amount of PTO, quarterly bonuses)
-Ability to work remotely and very flexible with hours
-Quarterly and Annual Reviews
-Impressive client list, you may have opportunities to work with very well known companies
-Company is growing very fast

Cons

-Long Hours
-Stressful
-Poor communication between departments
-Lack of standard terminology and processes(many products or tools have multiple names)
-Poor training of new hires(this has been improving as of late)
-Proprietary software and tools that will not be useful skills at other companies
-Working in the services dept requires quite a bit of traveling
-Poor integration of acquired companies, most employees know very little about recent acquisitions
-While starting salaries for recent grads are very competitive, as you move up the corporate ladder the pay raises that go along with promotions are underwhelming
-Lack of knowledge and/or internal documentation. Many times I have been unable to find any documentation or even find someone within the company that is familiar with certain features of a product, you must be very self motivated to thrive at RedPrairie.

Advice to Senior Management

-Focus on usability of products, there are many feature that should be rewritten
-More testing of software before it is released
-Longer releases cycles, focus on quality not quantity. With our current release cycle a customer can install the latest version of our software and we will have a new version released before they finish implementation.
-Don't sell features that do not exist.
-Find ways to improve communication between departments and throughout the company in general, the organization if very fragmented.

Pros

management backs employee decisions for hte most part
can work from home as needed
flexible with timings

Cons

Extreme pressures
24/7 availability for customer

Advice to Senior Management

There have been some recent changes in the company structure. While I believe the changes are for the better and allows individuals more autonomy, some processes have not been nicely defined/implemented. Of particular concern is the process currently being followed to allocate resources for projects. This has led to a fair bit of confusion in the rank and file. The idea itself seems right but the plan is not flexible enough and raises a fair few questions. Similarly while the bonus structure has been explained very transperantly, the bench marks to be used therein have not been defined and made public leading to a fair bit of confusion. Neither of this is something that cannot be fixed in the long run. However, they need to be addressed.

Pros

* great people to work with
* growing fast (maybe a little too fact)

Cons

Disorganized re-orgs on a regular basis. This has a lot of people "falling through" the cracks and moving elsewhere for some stability.

Advice to Senior Management

Follow through and take the time to reach out to older employees with the knowledge that is seeping away at a very fast rate

Pros

-Free coffee in the break room
-Comfortable office facilities
-Nice people overall
-Competent and helpful IT support division
-The company makes charity and service to the community a priority

Cons

-Training was a joke. I was told I needed to "network" with others in the company to learn my job
-Everyone in the service organization is measured by billable hours over all else. Each minute had to be measured which lead to nutty behaviors, such as during a staff meeting "What project am I to bill this meeting?" and "I can't talk to you right now because I would not have any way to bill this conversation"
-The SVP of Services loved to tell people that he traveled more than anyone. He then had no problem requiring people to travel 100% time including weekends. There was a lot of burnout as a result
-Bonuses were withheld with little explanation or confusing reasoning.
-People were deeply unhappy and that lead to a lot of griping sessions that were tiresome

Advice to Senior Management

A fish rots from the head down...you might re-examine the leadership of the Services division