Pros
Alcon has some of the best people to work with. Much of those employed are experts in their field including the manufacturing and technical operations organization. Benefits are by far some of the best in industry including that of medical, defense, commercial and other types of oem's. It would be fair to say that the environment here at least at the Irvine Technology Center is fairly relaxed. Depending on what you might be working on, you always have the opportunity to move to a different position laterally, and sometimes vertically. But there are some caveats to that. Alcon, while it innovates, it's innovation frequency is slower than that of its acquisitions. So it's highly likely that employees new to the organization would be assigned to new products whether developed or acquired. There are several good managers here and I've found that managers do tend to listen to their employees. Of course like anywhere else, they listen within reason and also provide guidance and feedback but always within context of a job or otherwise. Work times are quite flexible, commuting distances are taken into account. The facility I'm at has a cafeteria, company store for Alcon or Novartis related pharmaceuticals that can be purchased at a discount price and of course they have an on-site gym. They have several outreach programs here at any one given time and very active in providing healthy alternatives such as diets and exercise counseling. There also exists (at least for some of the staff) training for all products. There is also academic reimbursement, though again there are some constraints with this benefit.
Cons
Sadly, I believe the cons might outweigh the Pro's of the environment. The product development process is 7 years?!? There aren't very many products in the pipeline. Upgrades take at least 2 years to get into play. There's obvious misinterpretation between what R&D thinks something should be and what things actually are. Having only one group control all BOM and implementation changes, maybe consider cross training a few other people to alleviate this obvious bottleneck. There exists far too much siloed communication between departments. There's also a power struggle between the MTO & MS&T. The relevance of engineers on the line having access to a lab for fixturing or experimenting is non-existent. Only 2 or 3 engineers per line is unacceptable at best considering the complexity of some of these instruments. Lead's are managerial rather than technical leads. There is no room for growth of upper level Technicians, once they hit the top of the tech scale they cap out on salary. There's no solid definition between job titles, nor is there then incentive to move up because it seems that promotions are given at small discretion. At the same time though people are being promoted to Principal roles or higher roles where they haven't shown that they have the technical or managerial proficiency to accomplish their roles, that is there is no proof of role breadth. Migrating from manufacturing to R&D is quite the process. In most cases it's impossible. Worst still anything job related is not handled locally but outside of California. So again HR has no foresight or visibility about any potential candidate and at the same time has little insight of what the job is as they don't actually reside onsite. Because Alcon is under transition to Novartis Technical and Operating manual, many of its inside processes are in flux. So many of the day to day operations procedures tend to change every 2-4 weeks so in a manufacturing engineering position one must always keep on their toes as well as try to stay up to date with all the needs that corporate changes so often. As said earlier with only 2-3 engineers per product it makes satisfying requirements like this next to impossible. Also there's very little budget per line for capital equipment or even tools .There's no access to a small machine shop when fixturing needs to be made. The machine and model shop that's in Lake Forest is off limits and work orders must be put in in order for anything to be accomplished. However, the communication needed to accomplish even small tasks seems to fall to right off. Alcon uses Windchill and their system of engineering change notices is antiquated at best. They have a database for everything, but none of these databases talk to each other. Their ERP system is from the mid 1980's so is very much behind the times. At the same time with Novartis introducing new software and regulations literally every month, it makes accomplish small task very time consuming. The access to high level software (Matlab, R, Minitab, Mathematica, Labview, FEA related programs) is off limits for most of manufacturing personnel. The validation system in place could benefit to being more streamlined and further still when big projects need to be executed there should logical project managers and timelines established as well as logical and meaningful milestones need to occur. Not everything needs to be accomplished from a Lean Six sigma mentality. A kaizen event is not always useful if the system in place currently is still under development. Tiger Teams would be beneficial. Also short cubicles suck.
