SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money

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Borg108
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(6/18/03 8:17 pm)
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SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money

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Post by Member108:

Most people out in the real world, as SRF like to call it, don't know about the extent of mismanagement and financial waste going on inside SRF. A common thread here is the Peoplesoft fiasco discussed on this board. It has cost SRF upwards of $14 million at this point, all to replace an accounting system costing less than $10,000 a year. Incompetent people trying to fix these things just make them worse.

SRF had originally hired multiple consultants making over $300,000 a year to determine the need for an accounting system and guess what?? They recommended a gigantic one and that they be hired at these huge salaries to implement it. SRF, with their spiritual judgement and ability to read character, of course hired them. They could not tell they were being cheated. One of these consultants even asked for and got a car and apartment while making $350,000 a year!!!! All this while holding down the salaries of members to little better than minimum wage! These consultants did very little and after six years they were all finally removed. Of course a new batch was hired. SRF members... your donations at work.

What SRF management had done, over the objection of SRF members in the computer profession, was to bring in a tremendously expensive accounting software program called Peoplesoft. www.peoplesoft.com This program is prices and designed for very large corporations not little non-profits of 500 employees. Ignoring all warnings they purchased all their products at once and six years later HAVE NOT EVEN INSTALLED many of them much less used them. So did they finally decide to stop the millions in payments from going out? NO. They have hired a new company, Corio www.corio.com, to manage the whole process. They have signed a long term contract not only locking them into the hyper expensive Peoplesoft products but now they have locked themselves into a hyper expensive maintenance and support contract.

Way to fix the problem SRF!

This will cause the continued financial bleeding that has gone on for years to continue. The result will be more layoffs and the continued selling off of assets.

SRF is desperate to save money but is totally incompetent in doing so. They also recently opened up the ordering of their books on the Internet. The website, www.srfbooks.com, was setup by SRF recently in order to sell books and things. A company called 4th Way Fullfillment, www.4thwayfulfillment.com/, is now the company that handles orders for SRF and does the shipping. All of the orders members think are being handled by SRF are now being shipped out of Oxnard. SRF pays the SRF employees who had up to this point done these order related jobs very little money. Are they SAVING MONEY??? They will be surprised to see they don’t save any money but it has given them a chance to get rid of more pesky members. They are such a bother. The management at SRF is sure lousy at doing cost justifications. Of course they are not too keen on loyalty to employees either but is loyalty really that important? (ha ha)

Imagine the poor devotees around the world who think they are ordering things from the wonderful Mother Center. They send in a little note about a prayer request with their order and it ends up in the trash at 4th Way.

The Member Services department is now getting slower and slower due to the loss of orders. More layoffs are expected. Of course even members are quitting SRF now which is something that never happened before. It is not just monastics who are leaving.

SRF goal in all this is of course CONTROL. They felt they had lost some control using members to help with computers and shipping and order entry. Their thinking is that if they can outsource it to non-members and form contracts with outside companies that due to some magic business contract language they will have control. When SRF has members inside the organization they discovered that these members are finding out what a limited cult SRF really is and that MUST be stopped. Damn the cost. Get the members out of here! They talk too much and keep criticizing things! SRF is hemorrhaging members at a high rate out in the world and they have added hemorrhaging money in an effort to hide it.

There is a great lesson in the printed SRF Lessons on how to select business partners. SRF really needs to read it. Like with most things, they don’t practice what they preach.

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