Although it doesn't change the fact that we have been thrown under the bus, out of curiosity, Can anyone shed light on the criteria and rationale behind our selection for Accenture?
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Can someone explain what's so complex about TIAA's record keeping? I know TIAA is a me ad house filled with most incompetent employees but fail to understand how this is more complex than let's say vanguard or fidelity of properly managed
Stop complaining.. no job is guaranteed for life.
We have no been working with Accenture for 3 years. Assuming some of us don’t know what Accenture is and what they do on this page a very flawed assumption. They have been working on coming up with a contractor for this for 3 year. It is incorrect to say we have been working with them for 3 years. We only very recently signed that contract. They 100 percent do not know what we are doing at the detailed level yet.
We were lucky to get everyone 2 year contracts, but if you ignore that we still would have had a large percentage of people offered jobs. If they knew what they were getting into they wouldn’t need to have people on boarded. The fact is they don’t. Logically they can’t because we don’t have everything written down. We have it in spreadsheets and people might know what is done on those. I say might because we have recently fired people who were the only people who knew how to do something and we had to research the whole process to rebuild it from scratch. So they can’t know everything we do yet when we don’t know everything we do.
Now my final point on this is, yes this is what they do, they also aren’t always successful. Anyone who works in operations knows that when we generally don’t offshore complex work because it requires decisions that may or may not be straight forward. They are very successful with building out standardized processes and moving those offshore. We interestingly are too. The issue we have is we don’t have a ton of processes that are or can even be standardized. Our whole history has been based on non-standardization of plans selling RK services with full customization. Then giving it to ops and saying “oh you can figure out how to do this right”? That is not something Accenture is set up for, they can’t make money if they can’t automate or offshore it. They have also failed before. There are multiple companies where they signed a contract with Accenture. They spent 2 years trying to make it work and it failed and they cancelled the contract. It’s not as straightforward as “this is what they do”.
What’s the rationale for selecting Accenture ?
It’s simple, they will steal every “trade secret” the next 2 years from how to process payments, calculating actuaries, researching death benefit claims, etc.
After 2 years, count on 50% of TIAA employees moving to Accenture to be replaced by someone in India making $6000 a year.
...Tiaa has been working with Accentre for the past 3 years...are current contract workers are from Accentre...they know what they are getting into...research Accentre...this is what they do..
@1rbl+1uvxqCJg I’ve been saying the same thing. The lack of knowledge concerning the intricacies of operations by the EC for years, is why we can’t remain competitive. They refuse to listen to those who are in the trenches problem-solving and gap-filling every day just to get transactions out the door. I would love to be in on those meetings Accenture has once they see the “lemon” they bought in all of its flawed glory! This might however be a win for those of us going to Accenture. It is going to take more than the projected 2 year timeline to make our systems efficient and effective. Or… they may cut their losses (and us) after it’s all said and done.
@1sow+1uvxqCJg
I agree. I think once Accenture actually sees what we do they are gonna regret this contract. Nothing is standardized and so many workarounds not even bots were able to help much.
I hope I’m wrong and they help make things better but we are stuck and have been due to our platform when launched some 20 years ago that was recently updated for the first time in 15 years.
The only thing this move with Accenture does is build yet another silo in this farm of silos. Taking our people offsite, remote, or a different floor? Why?!? we have had contractors sitting in cubicles next to us in the office for literal decades.
Not being able to collaborate with colleagues from TIAA and Accenture in the same office will only make matters worse. Why doesn’t the EC see that? What is there to gain from moving Charlotte folks to an old building we used to lease versus staying on campus?
What do you mean we were selected? If you mean record keeping ops. It’s because we cost too much compared to the competition and we don’t have enough money to become cheaper fast enough. I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what we did.
This was already trying to happen internally, automation, outsourcing, etc. TIAA couldn’t throw enough money at it fast enough to bring the cost down. By moving this to Accenture, we have now fixed the cost of operations and Accenture is taking on the risk of trying to lower costs.
Personally I don’t think they will pull it off. We don’t have enough standardized things that don’t have 500 exceptions with exceptions to the exceptions. Maybe I’m wrong, but based on how well the EC understands what we’re doing on the ground, I don’t think they understand that we are very complex, not necessarily complicated. That difference will significantly slow the savings that Accenture needs to get.