Small business glitches

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Dated 1/04/00

Small businesses find glitches

The Associated Press

Some small Kansas businesses have found Y2K's first workweek downright buggy.

Managers arrived Monday to find older systems struggling to handle the new year and the change it brought to many computers' internal clocks.

Though there were no reports of serious glitches that would significantly alter production, by mid-morning, National Computer in Wichita already had received 30 service calls. One-third of them were Y2K-related hardware problems, said service manager Sean Jensen.

Most of the calls have come from small, single-proprietorship types of businesses, mostly small business people who assumed they would be immune, he said.

The types of calls National Computer has received all involve hardware that makes the computer recognize times and dates. Many computers made before 1997 aren't reading the last two digits correctly.

"Mostly what they are doing is showing erroneous results in date-based calculations -- so the machines are running, but they are ending with strange results," Jensen said. "Garbage in, garbage out."

At Tech Support Inc., president Kevin Cole said the service calls they got Monday morning were minimal -- many fewer than expected.

His company has received a couple of Y2K-related calls dealing with software for scheduling and payroll.

"It might slow them down a day until the software manufacturer fixes the problem -- it's certainly not the end of the world," Cole said.

Dynamic Computer Solutions Inc. and Superior Computer Services, both in Wichita, report they have gotten no Y2K-related service calls yet.

A Kansas-based company offering Y2K bug advice to small businesses didn't find itself busy over the weekend or Monday.

Paul Clay, chief executive officer of Overland Park-based Mid-America Manufacturing Technology Center, said his company had taken a couple of calls from businesses experiencing minor, "back-office" software trouble that didn't affect production lines.

Workers at one business arrived Monday to discover they would need an entirely new set of administrative software, said Clay, who refused to identify the business.

"It was just a case of operating at near-capacity and not putting a high-enough priority on the potential impact of the rollover on scheduling systems and accounting systems," Clay said. "Basically, it just didn't get done."

Don Heiman, chief information technology officer for the state government's executive branch, said technicians Monday cleared 42,123 computer systems critical to state agencies. They had cleared all but one of the state's 192 most vital computer systems early Saturday.

The remaining system deals with the collection of taxes from businesses to finance unemployment benefits. Heiman said he rescheduled clearance for the system Tuesday because it interacts with federal government computers that won't be operating until then.

He said there were a few "hiccups" in state computer systems, but none of them was major.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 26, 2000


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