This isn't your last company

At my present company, I am both a CADmin as well as the process owner for Design and Development for our aerospace industry certification. That means at least once a day, someone comes up to saying that we should be using a different process or CAD tool. The request almost always starts the same:

“At my last company, we did / used…”

About 5% of the time, the person brings up some approach or additional software that we either haven’t considered or don’t use, and it’s worth investigating.

The rest of the time, though, it’s merely that the person’s previous company used different tools or processes, and everyone wants to go back home.

If your last company was so great, why aren’t you still working there?

To be clear, my door is always open and I’m always willing to listen and consider new avenues. However, most of the time when I explain why changing our CAD and PLM systems is neither wanted by our management nor feasible at this time, or that we spent a lot of time and effort deciding on our processes, I almost always get the same response:

“At my last company, we did / used…”

Oh. Now that you repeated yourself a second time, you’ve completely won me over to your argument.

This is not your last company. Almost everyone who works here worked somewhere else before. We don’t change our software or processes for the last person we hired.

I understand that everyone prefers the tools and processes they are used to. That which is familiar is comfortable, and that which is new is scary. But we’re not going to consider changing our tools and processes, let alone actually change them, just because you’re used to something different.