FORTUNE MAGAZINE - STRONG Y2K MANUFACTURING ARTICLE- April 27, 1998
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Excerpts
The manufacturing sector has the most to worry about, for its year 2000 problems are more complex, widespread, and difficult to remedy than those in straight- forward computer applications such as accounting and finance. Worse, manufacturing corporations were slow to wake up to the enormity of the task they are belatedly tackling.
Unfounded gloom and doom? Not if you listen to Ralph J. Szygenda, chief information officer at General Motors, whose staff is now feverishly correcting what he calls "catastrophic problems" in every GM plant. In March the automaker disclosed that it expects to spend $400 million to $550 million to fix year 2000 problems in factories as well as engineering labs and offices.
Or consider the words of Rob Baxter, Honeywell's vice president in charge of making his company's line of industrial control products "year 2000 compliant," to use computer industry jargon. From what he has seen among Honeywell customers, Baxter fears that "some plants will have trouble operating and will have to shut down. Some will run at a reduced scope. I expect considerable system outages during December 1999 through February 2000."
Small wonder, then, that many plant managers and their bosses plan to stay close to their jobs over the three-day weekend when the millennium rolls in. Already they've had a foretaste of what could go
wrong ......
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Manufacturing's task is compounded by the multiplicity of its computer programs. Below the layers of more or less standard software is a vast range of equipment run directly by built-in chips and programs, which outnumber those in the rest of business by a factor of ten.
Only about half of manufacturing's standard software was written in Cobol. The rest is a Tower of Babel, written in hundreds of tongues and added like onion layers to other software.
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Modern or ancient, factories have some problems in common. Most manufacturing is driven by schedules and real-time demands for information processing just as severe as those in telecommunications and finance. The precision and interdependence of process controls in chemical plants, for instance, make a Rube Goldberg fantasy contraption look simple. Let a single temperature sensor in the complex chain of measuring instruments go cuckoo because of a year 2000 problem, and you'll get a product with different ingredients than you need--if it comes out at all.
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So for a long time manufacturing companies snoozed, including GM. When he arrived at the automotive giant a year and a half ago to take over the CIO job, recalls Ralph Szygenda, he was amazed "that most people assumed that the factory floor didn't have year 2000 problems."
"At each one of our factories there are catastrophic problems," says the blunt-talking executive. "Amazingly enough, machines on the factory floor are far more sensitive to incorrect dates than we ever anticipated. When we tested robotic devices for transition into the year 2000, for example, they just froze and stopped operating."
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FORTUNE MAGAZINE - April 27, 1998
By Gene Bylinsky & Reporter Associate: Alicia Hills Moore
Industry Wakes Up to the Year 2000 Menace
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