Honestly, I can't see how anyone would rate this company more than one star. This is the absolute worst company I've ever worked for. Acuity Brands Lighting claims to be a “lean” organization, so I will grade their performance on that standard. Here are a few examples of how they have implemented "lean" principles:
TRANSPORTATION: All inventory moves between distribution centers is facilitated by means of hard-copy ship tickets that are physically attached to a pallet or parcel while in transit. It is not uncommon for these ship tickets to have wrong item/quantity or for the ship tickets to get lost--creating huge inventory inaccuracies at both the shipping and receiving DC. The receiving process is not very robust and the receivers constantly have trouble keeping up with the work because of the sheer number of errors.
INVENTORY: Upper management (executive level especially) and most of middle management say they want everything to be "visual", but this usually translates into heavy reliance on manual systems that are poorly implemented and poorly executed. It's as if they tried to copy the processes and systems used by other companies without first understanding the underlying concepts. Inventory is exclusively managed by means of visual Kanban cards, which are physically attached to the products in the warehouse and assembly center. These cards provide the only signal to buyer/planners to replenish inventory. There are thousands of these cards floating around the warehouse. When the cards are lost or not played correctly this usually is not noticed right away and leads to stockouts. You just don't have the bandwidth to manually audit each of the items in your inventory frequent enough to prevent this from happening. I'm sure this contributed to our very high turnover rate. The analysts at corporate headquarters who provide the forecast are no help at all. Management will often overreact and quickly move to shift blame to cover their own failings. In many cases the information on Kanban cards will not match the data in Oracle. Much of the system data that you will use on a daily basis is totally garbage; half of the pallet quantities in the system are flat out wrong and as are many of the package quantities. When products are moved in the warehouse the transactions are not done in real-time in the computer. Our inventory had very high negative balances (negative quantity in stock). Our inventory included millions of dollars worth of items that were obsolete, defective, or otherwise unusable; however, upper management would not allow us to scrap any of it. In the place where I worked inventory discrepancies were pervasive.
MOTION: There is a lot of wasted movement in the warehouse. Forklift drivers often report not being able to find product in location. I also observed this to be the case when I audited warehouse locations. Part of this problem had to do with our inventory transactions not being done in real time--product would be moved but the computer would still tell the forklift drivers to pick from a different location.
WAITING: There is a lot of waiting due to inventory discrepancies. In many cases, entire shipments with hundreds of thousands of dollars of material are delayed because one line item, for one order, worth less than one hundred dollars, can’t be found in the warehouse. In many cases, shipments destined for other distribution centers will sit in a staging area for weeks to wait for enough material to make a full trailer. The receiving distribution center will get the blame for shipping orders late even though they did not receive the material until after the orders were already late. At the facility where I worked, more than 90% of all inbound trailers had large orders that were already marked late before they even reached our doors.
OVERPRODUCTION: customers frequently were allowed to change orders at the last minute and this wreaked havoc on our inventory. If the assembly center produced an order for a non-stock item, but the order was cancelled after production finished it would be unusable and go into "problem file". Sometimes orders would be in transit to a distribution center but then be switched to ship direct to the customer from a different facility (to improve lead time and make up for process failures), so we would end up double producing and have excess inventory on hand. As a result, our inventory had millions of dollars worth of unusable inventory.
OVERPROCESSING: IT support is 100% centralized. There is no local IT person that you can call on for quick and easy resolution. Instead, you will be asked to create an IT support ticket and wait for a response. Meanwhile, you are unable to do your job. It sucks for everybody, but it really sucks for new employees or those that transfer to a new department. The process of creating a new IT support ticket requires that you navigate through a very large drop-down menu of categories. If you pick the wrong category, then the IT department will “resolve” your IT issue by telling you to create a new IT support ticket in the correct category (but they won’t tell you which category is the correct one!). Usually this takes a very long time and/or requires multiple tickets to get to a final resolution. For example, it took them two weeks to fix my printer (what was I supposed to do in the meantime?).
DEFECTS: The majority of products that Acuity sells are manufactured in China or Mexico and “assembled in USA.” Most of the factories have decent quality control. However, Acuity’s distribution centers and assembly centers are not, nor will they ever be, ISO 9001 certified with current systems.
Management:
Management’s expectations are totally unrealistic. They do not respect or trust their subordinates. They are very cutthroat. I’ve seen unwarranted/random layoffs. They tend to attract other managers who behave in the same way. Meaningful change is not possible unless management changes. Success = become a mindless robot, keep your mouth shut and don’t rock the boat.
Systems:
Information is inaccurate, outdated, and/or impossible to find. Multiple web-based tools that don’t communicate with each other. IT Support is centralized. Heavy reliance on manual systems. No reinvestment of profits into better systems/infrastructure.
Training:
There is none, sink or swim. Standard work is a cop out, what a joke. No subject-matter experts due to high turnover rate. Transition from one role into another with little/no notice.
The work:
Long hours (12-14 hours/day) 7:00 AM till whenever you finished “non-negotiables”. End of year inventory 5 AM to past midnight including Friday and Saturday. Zero work-life balance. Understaffed, overtime is the panacea. Buyer/planners will spend inordinate amounts of time doing the job that customer service is supposed to be doing.
Coworkers:
Hourly associates and group leads are underappreciated and get a lot of blame. Management is terrible.
