Remember CK telling about Kraft presentation? Here is some more...
'------------ Electric Utilities and Y2K
Rick Cowles, best known for his books and articles on the
power industry, talked about fast track remediation
strategies for dealing with embedded control systems. Rick's
main point was that for large, or embedded heavy
enterprises, there is very little time left. If they aren't
deep into the inventory and analysis phase, they will
probably have to look at bringing in a solutions provider
to help. He had copies of his new book, Electric Utilities
and Y2k. You can find his book at:
year2000.com , and Rick's web site
on Electric Utilities and Year 2000 is at:http://www.euy2k.com/ .
------------ Krafting a Y2K Solution
The next session was put on by Evan Hand, a Kraft engineer
who talked about what Kraft was doing about its embedded
systems problems. Kraft Foods has more than fifty
manufacturing and distribution centers and more than 50
co-manufacturers with over 55,000 potential problems. They
also have to assure the compliance of 5000 vendor products.
At the beginning of his talk, Mr. Hand told the audience
that he would give them an overall view of the remediation
effort at Kraft, then he would get into specifics and give
them the actual numbers. Kraft has already had some year
2000 problems surface. Several million dollars worth of
food was destroyed because the food expiration date was
after the millennium. Because of two digit date encoding,
the warehouse had processed the shipments as expired anddestroyed them.
The management objective at Kraft was to have continued
operation with minimal impact to the facilities and at
minimal cost. Kraft also decided to introduce a radically
different way of dealing with their year 2000 problem. They
are talking openly about it.
Many large manufacturers have similar problems, but Kraft is
the first one I have heard of who has implemented an open
door policy. Kraft is telling what they are doing and why,
and also detailing the tools they are using. They are
sharing their compliance database with their vendors and
their test criteria with their vendors, business partners,
and the public. The engineers convinced the legal staff
it was the only way they could fix the problems. And the
Legal department let them do it. Mr. Hand then gave out the
numbers. Kraft has tested 832 Programmable Logic
Controllers so far and had found 10% of them to have a date
capability, a higher number then they had initially
estimated. He also talked about what kind of problem the
tested machines had such as a subtraction problem or date
roll over. At Kraft, the PLCs control safety and food
production, so any glitch will shut down the whole line.
The audience was very appreciative of Kraft's effort and
their willingness to share the results. Several people
commented that it was the best presentation they had seen.
Mr. Hand didn't minimize the legal problems. He couldn't
tell their target date for full compliance at the conference
because Kraft's lawyers insisted that announcing any date
before December 31, 1999 would put them in legal jeopardy
if any systems encountered problems after that date.
There is also a thicket of disclaimers around their
knowledge sharing, but it is working.
'
From www.year2000.com newsletter |
