Millennial mayhem for manufacturing ...will factories function today?
memagazine.org
from mechanical engineering magazine (for all you so called engineers)
Power utilities must also fix the millennium bug: One reported test for y2k compliance by Hawaiian Electric caused the entire system to shut down.
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Determining the true costs of y2k is difficult because of the compared with banks, say, or the Social Security Administration. Most estimates reflect corporate IT's needs-fixing applications that are supported by IT and easily identifiable as computer-based-and not manufacturing's needs, like adjusting embedded dates in various production functions. "Nobody really knows how severe the problem is," Miklovic said.
Only now are companies becoming aware of y2k as it concerns manufacturing operations. "Most manufacturing firms have a y2k corporate project in place already," Owen said, "but very few have kicked it in at the operations side of the issue. The problem's been a combination of people in plants thinking it's strictly a downstream corporate/IT problem and the corporate/IT people not being aware of how the systems are running in plants."
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Embedded Bugs
"Embedded systems are everywhere," Owen said, "in chips, circuit boards, proprietary units, and so on." Unlike corporate programs that use languages like COBOL and can be rewritten, "these systems have hard-coded logic that we can't get the source code for, so they require a whole different approach for testing and resolution. Unless fixed, they can be the source of bad data, especially with date/time stamping. . . . High-level systems, such as those for analysis and scheduling, may have more problems because they'll be working from 'injected' bad data." Inventories, which often rely on such date/time stamping, may not be restocked properly because of misread years.
Any manufacturing-related process that is measured over time can be affected. For example, a number of smart sensors have the ability to track when they were last calibrated, and they issue a signal if they operate past their scheduled recalibration date. Many of these instruments currently use the two-digit year, so after Dec. 31, 1999, they will quite likely go out of calibration.
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