Thread regarding West Corp. layoffs

Responding to the first comment, it may have been apparent to most people outside of the office that the Tucson office was closing, but to Tucson it wasn't. The employees in Tucson were loyal... To a fault. We've taken so many punches from Intrado/West we got used to it. Budgets were cut, sure. Nothing broken got fixed, but that's just West being cheap. People got laid off, but that was happening across the company. They just stopped caring about employee morale, but everyone's just too busy.

The managers literally held meetings assuring everyone that we were going to be okay. During "Live with John" last year we were assured that the major layoffs were over, and only those that were resistant to the go forward plan were at risk. Even though we knew it would be coming, everyone wanted to believe that there was some decency left in West.

For anyone reading this page, if you're seeing those types of signs, your job is likely already in Jeopardy. Don't make the same mistake that Tucson did and view Intrado through Rose colored glasses, because you are viewed as nothing more than a negative number on the company's profit and loss sheet.

Not to mention, after the Engage acquisition, new account setup was handed over to a team of techs who had never worked on the platform before. The training that was provided by the Tucson office often went ignored by Senior management, while decisions were made to change how things were done, and fire the experienced workers forewarning the results of said decision-making
This resulted in hundreds of accounts that were pushed live in a bad state, clients angry with the service before even making it to Tech Support.
These types of actions made terminations shoot through the roof, something that was NOT common before the acquisition. Tech Support was literally rebuilding accounts trom the ground up within weeks of them going live.

Also, the only time I ever saw anything get upgraded at West was if the forbidden words "PCI compliance" were uttered in the same sentence. Then everyone panicked and got some half baked solution in place to adhere to the new standards. It was a never ending dumpster fire.

That was a problem with almost every West product or project was the lack of any kind of investment or upgrades to infrastructure and platforms. It took months, sometimes years to get anything stood up. The people setting up the servers often had to be handheld through setup and if you wanted something that wasn't a pre-built redhat package, goooooood luck.

Having worked on multiple platforms, I can say that the only reason Groupcast was selected is because it's current capacity is one of the highest, however that system gets stressed during certain times of day, and wasn't designed with healthcare in mind. It will be missing many features that most consider basic.

Housecalls is antiquated with a Windows 3.1 esque interface.

Engage had the potential to set West up as a market leader. It was easy to program for, and everything about it was built in house, so there's less licensing to worry about. As for capacity, the system was very scalable given the appropriate resources...

In my opinion that program was sabotaged by upper management. The sale of Callpointe to West included a disclosure that the current server was flirting with capacity and would need to be upgraded within months. The then CEO actually did purchase a new server, but after her retirement the server was reallocated. West continued to migrate customers to the system, and things inevitably slowed down. Multiple requests were put in for upgrades, but we're declined due to budgetary restrictions. The fact that it's still running at all speaks to it's resiliency... It's been essentially running a 3 year long stress test.

The platform worked fine, until West got involved. Then they got rid of anybody with any knowledge about it, couldn't figure things out on their own, and called it a dud.
Once again, can't get rid of the knowledge base, and then expect everything to be peaches and cream. It's a surefire sign of piss poor management.

Engage should have never ever been the future of West Healthcare in the first place. Executives got distracted by all the pretty pages and site and didn’t really look underneath. It’s the same b—s— going on with groupcast right now. That platform will never ever be able to service healthcare customers because the people in charge don’t understand the business and what healthcare clients want/need. HouseCalls should be the platform going forward. It’s like Han Solo said, “She might not look pretty but she has it where it counts.” Engage was a mess and many issues and problems. It’s so bad that customers that were put in that platform are now being taken off because the platform can handle the load.

The biggest client we have is aware of the lies coming from Intrado. Not long before their entire Engage investment is completely worthless, and it is all their own doing.

I don't expect some of the bigger clients serviced out of that office are going to be too pleased about this. They have an expectation of a personal touch, extremely fast turnaround times, and nearly flawless accuracy- so I wouldn't be surprised if West loses them in the next year or so.

Considering that the platform run out of the Tucson location was slated to become the future of West Healthcare before Apollo took over, it is a shame. They bought a thriving competitor, and drove it into the ground.

People with biases moved into positions of power and influenced decisions that ultimately k–led their best chance for a comeback. You can't strip a platform of it's resources, ignore warnings, layoff those with the most knowledge, and expect things not to fail.

Makes sense buyout the competition s— them for all their resources and work. Make a new platform with all the best products from each platform close out the competition and present one platform no competition. Intrado is not doing it right. There is way more money to be made in healthcare.

Not much of a surprise. The director of our group told us earlier this year that the Tucson office was going to be closed when the lease expired on their building in November, so it was common knowledge. Plus, the resources in Tucson pretty much worked exclusively in support of a product that West/Intrado has been actively trying to decommission for over a year. In this case, the metaphorical "writing on the wall" was more like a billboard with flashing lights.