The Real Year 2000 Nightmare: Manufacturing Systems
Found on C.S.Y2K
Quotes from Jenkins, Unilever managers and others.
Regards,
John
------
From Jan 5 1998. Includes case study of Motorola's 6-step approach.
URL: industryweek.com
******************Fair use quote for the www-impaired (hi Cory)*******
January 5, 1998
The Real Year 2000 Nightmare:
Manufacturing Systems
An IW exclusive
By John Jesitus with Doug Bartholomew
At midnight on New Year's Eve a year ago, New Zealand Aluminum Smelterslearned a hard lesson about the date sensitivity of its plant-floor systems.
<snip>
More than enough has been written about the problems that could result if
a company's higher-level, often mainframe-based accounting and
human-resources systems are unable to cope when their internal
clocks--lacking a four-digit date field for the year--must make the shift
from 1999 to 2000. But relatively few manufacturers are as yet aware of
the complex Year-2000 date-change problems that can disable many
crucial factory operations. Some companies, in fact, use time-and-date
information for as many as 40 different purposes on the shop floor.
When addressing Year-2000 problems, "The No. 1 mistake that
manufacturers make is underestimating the risk they face at the floor
level," says Tom Bruhn, director of business development for Raytheon
Automated Systems, Birmingham.
"Many companies have very little appreciation of whether their products will fail or not," says David Waddington, information manager at Unilever NV, Rotterdam. "It's really quite a nightmare scenario. Quite a few people are going to have sleepless nights dreaming about this."
<snip>
Other concerns that manufacturers face in addressing plant-floor
technology relate to the complexity of equipment used in this area. "What
they are finding at the plant-floor level is really squirrelly, largely
because of the long time these systems tend to stay in a plant," says
AMR's Swanton. Some of these systems that are affected are fire
protection, safety, and security, many of which have timing devices that
include calendars. For instance, he says, "Many energy-conservation
systems and plants have time-of-day clocks that are not in compliance"
with the four-digit year. "All those Excel spreadsheets that are used to
run plant-floor systems are affected," Swanton adds. "It's sort of like a
bee sting. One or two won't kill you, but 1,000 happening at the same
time will hurt. Enough of that will build up so that you'll see a serious
performance problem in some plants." And if even one company loses 20% of
its production capacity, he states, "that ripples through the supply
chain."
<snip>
What makes issues such as this particularly troublesome is the fact that
in many companies it's unclear who's in charge of Year-2000 analysis and
testing initiatives at the floor level. "That's an area where no one
seems to claim ownership of the equipment," says Cobe's Williams.
"Factory-floor systems traditionally are not directly overseen by IT
departments." Even though the various Cobe manufacturing units that use
shop-floor equipment are willing to claim responsibility for solving
potential Year-2000 problems, Williams states, "they don't necessarily
understand the scope of the issue. So it's hard for them to appreciate it
or raise it to a level of even putting resources against it."
Cobe is hardly alone in this regard. Although the Internet and other
public media are rife with road maps that detail how users can find and
fix Year-2000 problems in everything from a PC's internal clock to a
major vendor's software application, Williams thinks companies are
picking the low-hanging fruit and avoiding the stretch it will take to
get to the more difficult systems.
Fortunately, third-party help for addressing shop-floor Year-2000 issues
is available, although not widely so at present. Options in this area
include Raytheon Engineers & Construction, Lexington, Mass., and Fluor
Corp., Irvine, Calif. "You have to have people who are shop-floor savvy to
go through the environment" to help ensure that behind-the-scenes issues
don't get overlooked, says Raytheon Automated Systems' Bruhn. For
example, he notes that even though a system does not use a date stamp on
a report, "it may use a date to do internal calculations, which can become
absurd or end up dividing by zeroes at some point and shut down."
Systems vendors also are entering the Year-2000 fray. In this category,
most companies are making their current offerings millennium-compliant or
at least announcing when this feature will be available. Likewise,
analysis of older models has begun in earnest, with suppliers including
Foxboro Co., Foxboro, Mass., Elsag Bailey Process Automation, Wickliffe,
Ohio, and Rockwell Automation (maker of the Allen-Bradley, Reliance,
Dodge, and Rockwell brands of factory automation equipment) offering
databases and other tools to help users determine which of their products
are compliant and what to do about those that aren't.
For example, Foxboro, a supplier of measurement, control, management, and
other information-related services whose specialty involves processing
industries such as refining and pulp and paper mills, recently began
making its Year-2000 compliance testing facilities available to
customers. Last fall, the company also began sending service teams out to
client sites.
However, not all equipment vendors are convinced that the millennium will
be quite the time bomb that some industry sources are expecting. "To me,"
says David Imming, manager of integrated solutions and Year-2000
project team leader for Fisher-Rosemount Systems Inc., Austin, "there
has been so much hype on this Year-2000 situation. Certainly if you look
at it worldwide, for government organizations and financial institutions
where they have all sorts of date calculations, they have many issues that
need to be resolved. And while it needs to be taken very seriously in our
industry, there are a vast number of our products that don't care at all
what century it is."
At the same time, some experts are concerned that manufacturers might dismiss their Year-2000 sermons as mere hype. "We sort of hate to sound like we are Cassandra in addressing this," says John Jenkins, president and CEO of TAVA Technologies, a Denver-based systems integrator. TAVA has teamed up with Irvine, Calif.-based Wonderware Corp. (maker of the FactorySuite automation package) to offer customers a detailed program called Plant Y2K One. "But over the next 24 months," he says, "there's a tremendous amount of work to be done."
<snip>
At Unilever, which has a major effort underway to solve the problem, the company has already found some PLCs that are noncompliant. One production line, for instance, shut down when the laser-driven printer putting "sell-by" dates on products couldn't handle the 2000 date.
Luckily, some manufacturers' Year-2000 efforts already are returning
dividends in areas other than the sheer avoidance of pain. "When we're through this whole process," says TAVA's Jenkins, "the monies that will be spent in upgrading factory-automation and process-control systems will produce a large jump in productivity."
<snip>
****************end fair-use quote*************
Tim Burke
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