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SRF Walrus > Troubling Waste > SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money
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member108 Registered User (6/8/03 7:22 am) Reply	SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money 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. Edited by: member108 at: 6/8/03 7:29 am
babaGEE Registered User (6/11/03 3:19 pm) Reply	Re: SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money Thanks for the update! I was wondering what was going on since I stopped going to temple. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. I didn't know they were selling real estate? I heard that a house was purchased earlier this year right across from Mother Center on Mt. Washington for around $600,000. I suppose no one knows how deep MC's pockets are. It's just too bad that devotees money has to be wasted like that. It's quite ironic that such a huge accounting system is being installed when the funds it's meant to track are probably shrinking, if what you say is true about the exodus of members. I thought I was among a few devotees who left until I came to this board. What an eye-opener!
ranger20 Registered User (6/13/03 7:59 am) Reply	Re: SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money This detailed account of something I'd only heard vague references to is painful to read, not only for past waste, but an apparent contract that locks it in for the future. Most small/mid size businesses I know anything about have outsourcing relationships for all their accounting and payroll issues. A friend who is a small contractor, another who is treasurer of a mid-sized church, and a third who works for a mid-sized non profit all report very satisfactory relationships with one of several national companies that handle payroll and benefits for reasonable rates. It sounds like some less than reputable "consultants" sold MC an expensive bill of goods! Very sad. An analogy that came to mind for the decision making "process" was the catholic doctrine of papal infallibility. Yet a catholic friend explained to me that that doctrine extends only to matters of theology and church doctrine. The pontif would not presume to be a business expert. Over the centuries they've learned to leave accounting to accountants.
member108 Registered User (6/13/03 9:51 pm) Reply	Re: SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money SRF is trapped by its own dogma. SRF is run completely by God and therefore what happens is God's will. To even admit to a problem or mistake is something they would never do. To them, and remember that they project their own values in this thinking, to admit to a mistake would take down the cult house of cards they derive their power from. They are convinced that members would leave Master if they new that SRF was not perfect. Since they work very hard to equate Master and SRF, failures of even an accounting project would mean Master was not perfect. Once we purge the current monastic environment and purge the silly cult following devotees Master will begin to attrack real truth seekers directed to God and honest mature spiritual principles. SRF will dry up and blow away. An accounting project which almost costs per year maybe 70% of the gross receipts per year of the company can only be considered a mistake. A mistake by fools. It is not just that the bad ladies are poor business people, they have no common sense and don't know who to trust.
Lobo Registered User (6/13/03 10:12 pm) Reply	Re: SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money According to an article in the LA Times Business Section, Oracle, the people who by the way want to help the good folks at the Dept of "Homeland Security" find a way to keep track of everyone with their computer applications, has made a 5.1 BILLION dollar offer to buy PeopleSoft. Seems that someone onthe BOD with omniscience might have seen these things down the road before signing on the dotted line. Maybe they should get Flynn back in to see if they can sue some of the "consultants" for their malpractice, poor judgment and advice. It only goes to accentuate what 108 has so well documented here for us, that what is going on within SRF the average member(s) have absolutely no knowledge of (like myself before good Member 108's expose' above). Just keep contributing when those "Voluntary League Appeals" come in the mail.
soulcircle Registered User (6/14/03 7:24 am) Reply	when Guests and All, As Yogananda once picked up a toy store owner's medical debt, when the owner was at the verge of losing his livlihood and store......... When will the mother of daya, when will Daya Mata and the board serve us and our larger self as humanity by picking up the burdens of those among and around us with 14 million, with 70% of annual receipts.........? as we have all been helped to where we our by kindnesses of living dayas........ two asides i recall Marshall Rosenberg when he took a call from me on kpfa rado in Berkeley, speaking of the book form about 1960 I think, in which it was revealed that thereis more compassion in non-attenders of worship, than in those attending worship throughout all faiths [with the caveat that among worshippers, in each place of worship there i a small group practicing more compassion also as evidenced by the leader of oakland's Marchall Rosenberg's group, Juilie Green, Marshall also has hemoragging organizationa problems...... asides aside.... ..... what tears continue to flow on the pillows within the nuns' and monks' rooms, in our hearts, as we pray for Sister Savitri, Sister Nimrata [is she truly homeless in San Francisco, and others we all pray for P.S. again, when i have new members over to my home, I find such compassionate out-reachings, spreading nationwide, as this following successful effort of haves reaching out to have nots ... http:/www.kidfarm.org .. does it open? tearcircle Edited by: soulcircle at: 6/14/03 7:25 am
ranger20 Registered User (6/17/03 12:46 pm) Reply	Re: SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money *Quote:* SRF is trapped by its own dogma. SRF is run completely by God and therefore what happens is God's will. To even admit to a problem or mistake is something they would never do. This came to mind yesterday, driving home, as NPR had a feature on the history of Ford Motor Co, on it's 100th anniversary. Master said if you want to get good at something, study the experts in that field, and Henry Ford was certainly a business genius. To gain market share in automobiles, he invented the assembly line, and with it, in one sense, the middle class. Because assembly line work was so boring, he retained workers by paying twice the prevailing wage for a 40 hour week, and eventually introduced benefits, pensions, etc. The article made clear that he did not do this out of the goodness of his heart (he attempted some serious union-busting), but as a pragmatist, searching for what works. Still, he had blind spots. He let the company seriously decline by refusing to update models, and even flew into a rage and took a hammer to a next-generation prototype that his engineers had assembled in secret. Eventually, he righted himself and his company by being pragmatic - what would work the the best? No enterprise is going to survive financially if it's accounting eats up 70% of it's revenue! Some "in denial" part of me just doesn't want to believe those numbers. They're too surreal, surely it's written wrong, and it's 7%! But if those numbers are even close, something's gotta give. Even if membership doesn't decline, charitable contributions are down as a function of a really weak economy. Business innovators like Ford, Eastman, Edison were able to understand mistakes as part of the trial and error process that enable you to get things right. A mind set that cannot acknowlege a mistake and try to fix it is just destined to create a whole lot more pain.
True Enuf Registered User (6/17/03 7:33 pm) Reply	Re: SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money So now Oracle's making a hostile bid for Peoplesoft, and Peoplesoft's suing Oracle for damages. If our brain surgeons hadn't wasted time and many millions suing no-pockets Walters over nothing, they could have sued deep-pockets Peoplesoft and Ernst & Young for real damages. That's what happens when the inmates run the asylum.
KS Registered User (6/17/03 9:02 pm) Reply	Re: SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money Hello everyone. Please remember to call Mother Center for advice on how to run your lives. They are divinely guided and they study the Teachings to the point where they are experts. My sarcasm for the day. Sorry.
soulcircle Registered User (6/18/03 2:00 am) Reply	KS Guests, KS and All, .......at times, what can make an excellent point better than sarcasm soulcircle
ranger20 Registered User (6/18/03 8:02 am) Reply	Re: SRF is hemorrhaging members, monastics and money *Quote:* So now Oracle's making a hostile bid for Peoplesoft Article on theStreet.com, claims Oracle wants Peoplesoft for it's customer base, but then intends to shut down the products, ie, eliminate a competitor. Seems now like Peoplesoft has the resources to resist for the present. Wonder how Peoplesoft is coming in updating all it's payroll programs to reflect the new tax laws, which should be in place....hmmm...now!

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