Constant software issues. If they don’t occur every day, they occur every week. Some colleagues call IT service desk every day. EVERY DAY! Also, the company runs 5 (if not more – lost count!) IT platforms that do the same thing which are not always synchronized. Reporting is made difficult by the use of the above mentioned IT platforms. You need to go to variety of places to retrieve data just for ONE report. That report can potentially be completed within 30 minutes, but not at Coram! Here it will take at least two hours! Further, every employee will have many different user names and passwords (have to be reset every 3 months). I never worked for a company that required more than three user names/passwords to access its systems. The company utilizes outdated unreliable software (10 to 15 years old) and two Excel add-ins that retrieve EXACTLY the same data. They slow down Excel and often crash. That wastes a great deal of time! At one point the program spit out an error mentioning DOS. Well seeing this particular combination of these particular letters in this particular order is unexpected in 2015. The argument that these IT issues are normal for a large organization is invalid because I worked for a number of companies which are even larger than CVS and did not experience such an outrageous amount of IT issues.
Training could be better; however, it is complicated by the large amount of different software in use. Some team members while nice expect you remember details the first time they tell you. I’m glad to do that; however I’m not a computer. Does anybody know of a brain surgeon to put a memory chip and USB port into my head so they can upload that huge amount of Coram information? Also, it is practically impossible to obtain alternative explanations of all the procedures and the uses of spreadsheets and Excel models. This greatly slows down learning experience and may make new employees tremendously inefficient. The key is not to be afraid to look stupid because it is uncertain if they explain things well enough anyways.
The management seems to be stuck up yet incompetent, only concerned about the numbers. Expects the business to do better yet refuses to radically change things. A perfect example of insanity.
One should realize that this is a struggling company with high employee turnover which turns into poor customer service. Complicated, slow and inefficient accounting and reporting makes the matters worse as even the management does not fully understand the way the company works.
