Workplace reviews and discussion: 惠朋國際股份有限公司

1. The company's ERP system is fairly well established, making it convenient to look up data—provided that you have sufficient permissions.

2. None.

1. The headquarters' clerical procedures are extremely complicated.

Often, just to handle a minor matter—for example, modifying a contact record in the system—you have to issue an official paper document and go through the entire document-processing procedure, which often takes one or two weeks or more.

In addition, document routing is managed very chaotically. Although electronic routing information can be checked, it is often not properly registered, so when you want to check a document's processing status, you can usually only call the people who might be handling it. You may eventually discover that the document has been sitting in a corner of some supervisor's office, delaying the processing progress.

2. The new product development process is disorganized, and human and material resources are insufficient.

Product development is carried out along multiple tracks simultaneously, but because the headquarters has very few development personnel, each person must handle many development projects at the same time, making it difficult to focus on individual cases.

Because the development unit has no actual supervisor—the general manager is directly above it—personnel still need to review drawings before they are issued and official documents before they are created. As a result, the heads of the quality control and production control units conduct the reviews and approvals horizontally, often making some basic work difficult to carry out. Moreover, each field has its own expertise: although the two supervisors mentioned above have many years of experience, they actually lack some knowledge of product development.

In principle, trial production and testing of new products are handled by the Zhangbin factory, with some components supplied by external vendors. However, in reality, the only person at the Zhangbin factory who can handle development projects is the factory director. Although the director does their best to help, their time is limited, and when there are many other matters at the factory, the development and trial-production schedule is delayed.

3. The company's management style is unpopular with employees.

Quite a few former employees have already mentioned this below. Although some of their comments are extreme, many are also truthful.

The general manager's management style is disheartening. As mentioned above, the development unit has no actual supervisor, so the general manager personally tracks development progress. When progress falls short of expectations, they often substitute angry scolding for inquiries. There have also been frequent instances in which the general manager berated employees for delays based on progress reports from several weeks or even a month earlier, apparently unaware that a new progress report had been issued that week and that the project had made further progress. This repeated behavior is extremely discouraging. To quote Mr. C, a colleague at the time: “You don't even look at the updates! Why should I update them!”

Discussing other individual incidents would inevitably involve personal feelings and risk being unfair, so I will point out only one thing: as of the time the writer left the company, among the employees working at the “Taichung headquarters,” excluding the general manager and CEO—the married couple—and the CEO's younger brother, only four long-serving employees had worked there for more than four years: Ms. N, the product department manager; Mr. S, the quality control department supervisor; Ms. J, a production control employee; and the general manager's driver. I am not a management professional, so I will not comment further on the company's management methods, but I believe the lack of experienced successors at the company headquarters already says everything.