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

1. The company's ERP system is fairly well established, and searching for data is quite convenient, provided that you have sufficient permissions.

2. None.

1. The document-processing procedures at headquarters are extremely cumbersome.

Often, just to handle a minor matter—for example, modifying a contact record in the system—it is necessary 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 can be queried, registrations are often not properly recorded. As a result, checking the progress of document processing often means calling the possible handlers directly to ask, only to eventually discover that the document has been sitting in a corner of some supervisor's office, delaying processing.

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

Product development is carried out along multiple tracks simultaneously. However, because there are very few development personnel at headquarters, 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 must still have drawings issued and official documents prepared for review. Therefore, the heads of the quality-control and production-management units conduct the reviews and approvals horizontally, which often causes some basic work to be obstructed. Moreover, every field has its own expertise: although the two supervisors mentioned above have many years of experience, they actually lack some knowledge at the development level.

In principle, trial production and trial runs for new products are handled by the Zhangbin factory, with some components supplied by external vendors. However, in practice, the only person at the Zhangbin factory who can handle development projects is the factory director. Although the director does their best to help, 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 mentioned this point below. Although some of the comments are rather extreme, many are also based on reality.

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, the general manager often substitutes angry reprimands for inquiries, and there have even been instances of demanding explanations for delays based on progress reports from several weeks or even a month earlier, without realizing that a new progress report had been issued that week and that the project had already moved forward. This repeated behavior is extremely demoralizing. As Mr. C, a colleague at the time, put it: “You don't even look at the updates—so why should I update them?”

Describing 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 three people consisting of the general manager and chief executive officer couple and the chief executive officer'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-management 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 shortage of experienced successors at the company headquarters already speaks for itself.