Vantaggi
what impresses me the most is their commitment to their wheel of values as well as their interest in making you a better person. anyone can say they have values, but when things go south and they still maintain their values(like the no lay off policy) thats when you know its true nature. people work to improve your incompetencies instead of letting you go. they care about your improvement, a lot of great training was approved for me, i was given the projects i was interested in, they listened to my ambitions. customer base is probably as good as it gets. if your looking at future prosperity and security, you can't match that with the energy industry, people will always buy energy. I believe in the value of our product, we truly create a novel product for the industry. it's simple, well crafted, and easy to use in your designs. its an honor to be part of this supply line this is a large company so you get some exposure to a lot of neat things like all-hands meetings with some great lecturers, anniversary luncheons, summer events tickets, summer interns, people from all over with different expertise so you can stay internal with project questions you may have, same with the variety of machines we have u can see whats been done so you dont re-invent the wheel...etc.
Svantaggi
although the people skills are strong, it sometimes seems like the technical skills are a bit lacking . a ton of engineering design(that's seriously not that hard to do) is outsourced, there's very little awareness of technology capabilities within the associates, meetings are more talking about re-training people rather than looking at vision systems and automation,..etc. i think this mindset is slightly derived from what i call, "blind conservatism". we developed a conservative mindset primarily from the strong quality ethics of our products but when you take that mindset to all aspects of the company, you begin to fail embracing change, and therefore, fail to embrace technological advancements. Darwin said you fail to adapt, you fail to survive. you dont have to be a genius to figure out that the most effective way to manufactuer a product for less is by using technology to automate your process. I think we're getting there slowly but not at the level of the dot com or silicon valley companies, those guys are on top of their game with technology awareness