Good morning.

Over the weekend, I was talking to some family members who live in Southwest Michigan.

As always, talk turned to Y2K. My father knows (small town, Mom's been in the employment business for 18 years, they know EVERYBODY in town ) the head of the Y2K remediation team at a local Fortune 200 company headquartered in the area. He asked him VERY recently how the company was doing.

The reply? "We've been working on this damn thing for 18 months and we still don't even know if our assembly lines will be running next year".

My brother in law (programmer), after a little more to drink, said that the company he worked at (a major machine tool builder, division of a multi-billion $$ company) was putting all of their new SAP-3 software back on line with no testing. They barely got the data from the old mainframes before some problem would have made this difficult (sorry, he stopped speaking English as I know it about then). He has been reverse engineering legacy programs without source code for some time there. He is puzzled/worried as to why this was happening.

I will not post the names of these companies on an open forum. I WILL provide them to anyone who emails me.

-- Jon Williamson (jwilliamson003@sprintmail.com), July 01, 1999

Answers

jonnie those are serious problems, especially you brothers loss of the king's english. hope everything turns out ok

-- corrine l (corrine@iwaynet.net), July 01, 1999.

My, this has made me popular.

About 20 emails so far in the last hour.

Moved to the country, prepping for an 8-10+, hoping for a bump....

-- Jon Williamson (pssomerville@sprintmail.com), July 01, 1999.

admit it jon-boy. you have always been popular.you've never needed to rely on an inside story to get attention in your life.

.

-- corrine l (corrine@iwaynet.net), July 01, 1999.

Interesting background info. Yes, please get hold of me - particularly about the unusual "urgency" of the conversion program. Something there doesn't make sense, particularly considering a SAP program, or in recovering info from an "old mainframe." I wonder if the hardware itself was failing. Seems the op system would be okay for at least another 5 months. Data storage media, the data itself, things like that should be okay. They'd have to be converted (or read from, written to) to the new devices or op system, but the rush is unexpected.

Damn, and just as the government is reporting evrything has been fixed. Right? So why is corrine so unhappy?

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), July 01, 1999.

I would rather have major intestinal tract surgery without anesthesia and antiseptics than go through another SAP R3 conversion. We actually had to bend our processes to fit the damn production tracking system. And it took a couple of months to migrate data because it all had to be hand-massaged to fit the SAP format.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week we had people working to put the data into the new system. Whatever happened to being able to download copies of existing data files and the new system interprets the old data format into it's requirements? Manual work was reserved fort inputting additional data not included in the old system.

TOTALLY ILLOGICAL! When we bought replacement systems in the military, a manual process like that would be an unacceptable bid for our contract. Are companies buying Y2K replacements so desperate that they'll take whatever the vendors offer, regardless of the pain factor involved?

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), July 01, 1999.

wild, not sure honey, but what do you have against hand-messages? i find them to be quite relaxing. a little wine and some vintage herb alpert records and it transports me to another universe.

-- corrine l (corrine@iwaynet.net), July 02, 1999.

Good stay there then.

-- Will (sibola@hotmail.com), July 02, 1999.