'First bout of Y2K flu to hit soon
By Stan Beer
The visiting chief of a UK financial software multinational has warned of a looming millennium bug disaster which may hit many SMEs less than two months from now.
Mr Ian Stewart, group chief executive of QSP Financial Information Systems, said in Melbourne yesterday a large proportion of organisations with 50 to 1,000 staff would run into trouble when they closed their books for the current financial year.
In the UK, Canada and Japan, where the 1999-2000 financial year begins in April, companies could run into fatal problems when they tried to roll over date-riddled invoicing, credit and debit management and general ledger systems into the new year, Mr Stewart said. What happened in April could well be repeated three months later in Australia (and in much of the US) on July 1, he said.
While all organisations faced similar problems with their financial software systems, which rely heavily on dates, a high proportion of SMEs still had not faced up to the Y2K issue -- unlike larger corporations.
"There is a common misconception that year 2000 problems are going to hit at the end of December this year or early January 2000.
"However, early April in the UK and the beginning of July in Australia, when companies do their year-end closing, are going to be interesting times for SMEs," Mr Stewart said.
"Forget about planes falling from the sky; what happens if a company's financial system gets wiped?
"Small and mid-sized companies are in deep trouble and many will stop working. These companies may not know what their outstanding debts are, when their insurance renewals are due and how many invoices are outstanding."
He said the lack of awareness about the Y2K issue in many SMEs was disturbing: "You talk to some of these companies about the year 2000 problem and it's troubling to see the glazed expressions you receive."
Mr Stewart said any claims that some SMEs could operate without computers were nonsense. "SMEs have the same type of cash-flow requirements as large corporations and if they can't do their invoicing and maintain their debtors' files, how are they going to operate? It is inconceivable today for an organisation of any reasonable size to operate without computers."
Mr Stewart said it was already far too late for many SMEs to implement even a partial fix of their financial systems.
"It's far too late to go through a business process re-engineering and implementing a full-blown ERP system from someone like SAP," he said. "It takes QSP 90 days to implement a basic system of mission-critical core financials."
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afr.com.au
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