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Technology Stocks : TAVA Technologies (TAVA-NASDAQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Hutchinson who wrote (6634)	11/28/1997 5:56:00 PM
From: Jack Zahran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

Don Hutchinson's Meeting with TPRO Rep in CA PART 1 The following data resulted from a question and answer meeting held at the Sacramento TavaTechnologies office on Tuesday, Nov. 25th. I have withheld mention of specific Tava client names which you will find frustrating and for that, I apologize in advance. As a result of the experience, I now have first-hand information that I could not have gotten any other way. Some of this information you already know. Some, you may not know. Hopefully, it's not all a big yawn for you. Please do exactly what we did and go visit the local Tava office in your town if you have time. More of us doing this will help our combined understanding. 1) Tava Technologies office on 11/25/1997 with the Sacramento area manager and the regional manager. Four of us visited Tava: 1 Private Investor with experience on the factory floor in the aerospace industry 1 Private Investor (me) 2 Stock Brokers I own Tava shares along with one other attendee. 2) What does the Sacramento Tava office do (used to be Vision Engineering)? Quote from Manager: "Simply put, we make stuff. If Nabisco figures out a new cookie, Tava builds the factory system to make the new cookie." Topro builds factories using Motocoms (sp.), Seimans, and Alan Bradley as suppliers. There are probably other suppliers. Tava is on the advisory board to Alan Bradley. 3) Tava Companies Tava companies are in different geographical locations. Tava uses resource leveling to share staff across geographical areas as needed. Vision Engineering is 13 years old. Now is called Tava Technologies. Sign outside building says Tava. Small building in an industrial business park. Purposely modest because their clientele are factory people who shy away from fancy office decor. Tava Companies Topro in Denver: Municipal Water, Waste Water business Tech Sales Inc (didn't discuss them) Vision Engineering Sac office VE office: Pharmaceutical and Food Manufacturing Territory = Cal thru Nevada Has the yyyy business 14 staff, 15 in Dec, 30 next year. Expanding office from 6700 to 7200 sq feet. South Cal VE office: Pharmaceutical and Food Manufacturing (Has the IVAX contract) Other VE offices: Phoenix (all training done here for Tava), Puerto Rico (lots of manufacturing), Boston Advanced Control Systems: Pharmaceutical and Food Manufacturing (east coast) Management Design & Consulting: Atlanta 4) Westchester Tava Office Does all the PlantY2KOne Compliance reports Not sure if this was a VE office. 5) Some Tava contract sites: Ohio, Hershey PA, Singapore, Florida, Cypress and Sac, CA, Prague, Germany, Switzerland 6) Local business (some Y2K): 11 corporations were mentioned. You would recognize almost all of their names. 7) Tava's Y2K work -- typical plant lifecycle: The inventory, assessment, and planning phases are billed at $160/hr. Inventory -- 2 staff on-site one day Assessment -- 2 staff on-site one week Planning -- lots of conference calls, maybe couple of weeks. Remediation -- total wild card on time as to resources required. 30% hardware cost, 70% people cost. Depends on what client wants to do. $150/hr to do research on component if it comes up as a non-hit on their database in Westchester. Employees in the Westchester office do the research. 8) Competition Alan Bradley Tava is also an authorized Alan Bradley integrator Raytheon We were told that once Raytheon saw Tava's PlantY2KOne offering, they decided to back off doing Y2K business, i.e. they were impressed with it and the database. So, on Wednesday, we called Raytheon and they said "We DO have a Y2K offering." We are following up with Raytheon. Bechtel We were told that Bechtel also saw Tava's PlantY2Kone offering and decided to not do Y2K work either. We have not followed up with Bechtel. Locally Sabre Engineering in Auburn, CA Matrix in Napa, CA PSI in Walnut Creek, CA (The engineer in our group says that PSI is a big business.)

To: Don Hutchinson who wrote (6634)	11/28/1997 6:08:00 PM
From: count gold	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

Don: very kind of you to offer to email your notes. IF you dont find a way to post them I would certainly appreciate an email copy at jaydee@gbso.net. Thanks Don!!!

To: Don Hutchinson who wrote (6634)	11/28/1997 6:19:00 PM
From: Jack Zahran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

Don Hutchinson's Meeting with TPRO Rep in CA PART 2 9) General Comments made by Tava manager(s) re Y2K Easy to sell because it "scares the crp out of 'em." Client management sees more threat from unknown than severity of the problem The factory Y2K problem is enormous Big mid-west auto mfctr $60-$80million Y2K project (Tava is in discussions with them) The golden egg for Topro will be after the year 2000: Tava will have on their database the most comprehensive factory floor inventory of anyone. Hiring qualified staff is difficult. The most qualified candidates are maintenance people and ex-Navy people. All engineers hired and Sales people go through Y2K training in Phoenix. The Vision Engineering acquisition went smoothly. The Tava business has expertise in a variety of geographic markets now as a result of the acquisitions. 10) Y2K Work xxxxxxxxx (big beef/milk supplier for US): Here's their immediate Y2K problem: Milk leaves ranch Arrives at dock of Market distributor Expiration shows a 00 expiration Automatically rejected at the dock and sent back to xxxxxx because milk is 100 years old Milk gets back to xxxxxx, must be tossed because now it really IS old by the time it took to ship it back and forth. yyyyyyyyyy (big food supplier) Run from the Sacramento office n plants across country Tava has 19 person team, 4 from here, others from other offices. Don't know actually how many factories they are working in at this point. Tava is finding 90-92% software compliance They're finding 70% hardware compliance (PCS, BIOS, Imbedded controllers, alarm systems) Also, Tava is discovering that yyyyy's Unix-based systems have Y2K problems. (Why Tava is dealing with Unix, I don't know) They believe this to be a generic problem across virtually all Unix systems. A test was run on one of their manufacturing lines where date was put to 2000. The whole line shut down. We were told "That scared the crp out of senior management!" Senior management at yyyyy instructed plant managers to be "forward looking" but not to simply replace their entire factory if they can avoid it. Point is and I'm paraphrasing the Tava manager, 'senior management really does not have a clue what's going on at the factory floor and what they don't know scares them.' Tava is seeing this management mind-set elsewhere, not only at yyyyyy. Factory floor managers are being given more decision making authority as a result but with guidelines. We were told to look for a yyyyyy announcement in January. They have asked yyyyy if they could announce but yyyyy wants to see some more results from Tava Y2K work. zzzzzz (aerospace manufacturer) Tava is doing Y2K work for zzzz. We didn't discuss the specifics on this though. IVAX We also didn't discuss the IVAX Y2K work in detail 11) We were shown the PlantY2kOne binder which contains hardcopy versions of all the input screens on the CD. The CD facilitates keyboard input into the input fields allowing for easy electronic transmission to Westchester. 12) We were also shown a 200 page compliance report done for a client. We do not know which client. Each page is devoted to describing the imbedded component and indicating whether it is compliant or not. The page is filled from top to bottom with information about that one component. Each page costs the client $200. 13) Opinions about the information we received. In most cases, the four of us share these opinions: The Tava database is centrally the most important asset they own. Yes, the market is enormous and immediate for PlantY2KOne. But, if you think of all the factory floors in just the US , look at how many staff Tava can bring to bear on a project, you quickly run out of resources. Somehow, IMHO, Y2K cash flow will have to become less dependent on Tava people being at Client sites. My opinion: If the Tava business plan calls for staff to be at Y2K cites, then Tava is a perfect take-over candidate for a larger organization that CAN provide additional staff and fully leverage the Tava database. Tava name recognition is an issue. The name is new to factory floor people. The Tava database in the hands of a more recognized name would be better. Time is running out. The embedded controller Y2K problem is HUGE worldwide. Coming away from the meeting I personally felt that my focus should be on building awareness of the Y2K embedded problem. (Cheryl has been doing this all along.) There is absolutely no way that our little Tava is going to help but a handful of the factory floors out of this problem. My opinion: the Government should mandate corporations with imbedded controllers to go through at least the assessment phase with Tava.