Plex Systems, Inc. Reviews

Pros

I have been at Plex for a few years now and I am still as excited about working for Plex as I was the day I started. Yes Plex is experiencing growing pains, yes some mistakes have been made. However, I have never seen a corporate team so determined to find and fix the issues that are affecting the employees. Plex is continuously implementing and improving programs to improve employee satisfaction, a topic taken quite literally.

I usually don't review a company while I'm still work there but when I see some of the incorrect statements and outright lies coming in some of these reviews from employees that have been terminated, I felt I had to get my opinion out there.

Advice to Management

Continue on the path you are on. Your dedication to your employee satisfaction is admirable.

Pros

At Plex there is a real sense of working together towards company goals.

Advice to Management

Keep up the good work!

Pros

It is a job and there are some really fun people to work with for however much longer I stay here. They give us free snacks and I do not have to work very hard.

Advice to Management

I wish I could have done more to help you. I don't think you wanted my help though so that's my advice. I think you should open your arms and embrace the people trying to help you. I know it's uncomfortable because it means you are admitting that you couldn't do it all by yourself. You need to do this though because people are not really that happy here anymore and you are losing a lot of talent.

Pros

Work life balance is good. Employees are hungry for success. Plex still has many loyal customers.

Advice to Management

Once you move beyond the understandably unsettling reality that you alone are preventing our growth, only then Plex will once again be on the path to Manufacturing ERP greatness.

Pros

- At the beginning of the year, things were...not so fun at Plex. The product redesign was late, the workload was increasing, promised headcount additions weren't coming through, and moral was low.

- As Winter turned to Spring, something very refreshing came out of the company meeting that changed my perspective of Plex - honesty. Revenue targets were lowered. Our Board of Directors finally understood that the growth they modeled in Excel wasn't going to happen by hiring n+1 salespeople. I feel bad for those that were let go, but I sometimes wonder if those requisitions ever should have existed in the first place. The truth is that the product wasn't ready for the kind of customers they thought they were going to sell to. That doesn't mean the product isn't robust, it just means that we need to spend a bit more on adding features/polish to compete against our larger competition. And that's OK!

- Spring brought investments in tooling and process workflow that finally started to show some results. If you're not measuring your performance, you're just guessing. Internal quality metrics were published, which was fantastic to see. Data doesn't lie. I'm glad Plex made investments in this area, it was very much needed.

- While Summer at Plex has been busy, we’re finally getting the headcount in certain areas that we were promised at the beginning of year.

- Hackathons are coming! Yes! This is an extremely important recruiting tool - continual self improvement/creativity should be a core tenant of Plex culture.

- We made a strategic acquisition that seems to be a good fit. Time will tell.

- Healthy snacks! Thanks for the additional weekly fruit from Nino's : )

Advice to Management

- Keep the administrative & sales vs. product development & support ratio in balance. Let the product sell itself; ultimately the market will discover the true value of what you're offering. It always does.

- I understand the desire to attract talent outside of Detroit, but the number of key personnel/managers working remotely outside of Troy is still too large. How can these people make any sort of meaningful impact on the product without actually working face to face with the people that are building/using it on a day to day basis? Again, be honest with yourself - you need to be here to shape product design. We need people that are passionate about Plex's success - if you aren't at Tower building the product or influencing how it should be built, you are a B/C player in it for the compensation. A-level players are passionate about their work because it's an extension of who they are. If these out of state people you hired are so talented, help ($) relocate them to Troy. Either go all the way with the investment or hire local - this half way stuff isn't good for Plex or the remote hire. And look, I get that we live in a world where Skype for Business/Webex/Zoom is just a tap away on our iPhone - that still _does not_ replace being at Tower, down on the engineering/implementation/support floors. True leaders lead the charge with the troops, and are down in the foxhole from time to time; they don’t issue edicts from the Boardroom.

- Since I’m assuming the Board is financially astute, I very much hope you’re following the peculiar movements of US equity markets – it seems the market is levitating upward based on earnings misses (Macy’s / Berkshire Hatahaway) that beat expectations. This sort of 1999 craziness is usually followed by a harsh recession. The Fed has propped up asset prices to an untenable level, and things will be correcting soon (although markets can stay irrational longer than shorts can stay liquid). I’m glad we’re looking to break even financially by the end of the year. Please keep a healthy cash position in 2017 so Plex can weather the storm. Winter is coming.

- Be honest with yourself, the product, the employees, and the customers. Eventually, the truth always reveals itself.

Pros

Plex strives for employee satisfaction. They actually do review and base their company goals on the annual employee company survey. They have succeeded in attaining a number of their goals.

Pros

Excellent talent and experienced individuals. A good history. Extremely loyal customers. Great upside potential. A product positioned to serve an underserved market. Good work life balance.

Advice to Management

Plex's executives are either hiding from the problems or they are unqualified to address them. Either way, they offer no solution. Change to this team is needed. Plex has great potential. Its current executive team does not. Board, are you listening?

Pros

I consider it a privilege to work alongside some of the most dedicated, passionated, intelligent, and friendly people I've ever worked with. The power of Plex is it's people, and that is something that has been consistent ever since I have worked here.

The work is challenging. There is much to do, and there is freedom to carve out your own solutions to problems.

The culture is great. Plex takes care of its employees. Solid benefits and bonus plan, and progressive policies, such as setting your own working hours, no strict vacation or time-off rules, and great working conditions.

Advice to Management

Stay the course. Continue listening to the employees, but don't get overly down by the naysayers. The CEO is great, but he needs to be a bit more visible.

I appreciate your continued and regular efforts to communicate to the employee base. It is appreciated. But I still get the occasional feeling you are spinning news when it is bad. Please don't do this. Give it to us like it is. We can handle it, trust me.

Pros

> Benefits are, in general, excellent.
> Free snacks (although the pickings have gotten far more slim).
> Great people (for the most part) to work with.
> Average pay
> CEO has started to adopt Plex's transparent culture very recently, avoiding corporate jargon and favoring directness.

Advice to Management

Listen to what your employees and customers want. Maybe look into Microsoft's Zero Defects methodology (no writing new code until there is no known bugs with existing code).

Pros

Company wide
+ Free snacks, soft drinks, coffee
+ Dedicated "unwind" space with pool and ping pong tables
+ Very good transparency within development department (cannot speak to other departments)
+ Decent communication from top-level leadership down to rest of the company (quarterly meetings, occasional company-wide email "check-ins," etc.)
+ Fair compensation, good benefits (401k match, quarterly bonus, tuition reimbursement, free gym membership, etc.)
+ Undefined number of vacation days ("responsible time off" - you just work it out with your manager)

Development department
+ Developers and development managers who care about improving themselves and the company
+ Every developer gets a private office (with a door!)
+ In general management trusts you to do your job, micromanagement pretty rare (depends on team)
+ Good hardware (minimum two 22" monitors, SSD, 16 GB RAM, i7-4790)
+ Clearly defined career path for a developer, delineated by several milestones
+ Languages, tools and technologies you will get to (have to?) use: C#, Javascript, Classic ASP, HTML, CSS, T-SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio 2012, ReSharper, GIT, SourceGear Vault, JIRA

Advice to Management

Keep on keeping on for the most part. Many of the cons listed are already known to the appropriate personnel and are being worked on, and those that are not should be.