Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: jan m. who wrote (11628)	2/18/1998 9:19:00 PM
From: C.K. Houston	Respond to of 31646

SUPPLY CHAIN .... Car seat example is pretty interesting. 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." And make no mistake about it, the impact of Year-2000-caused interruptions to business could be catastrophic, experts say. Should a shop-floor systems snafu be allowed to go undetected until it's too late, not only is the company that caused the trouble at risk, but so are its dependent business partners. "It could bring an entire supply chain to a screeching halt, because some plants will not be able to deliver," says Bill Swanton, director of plant-operations research at Advanced Manufacturing Research (AMR), a Boston-based research firm. "One little guy not taking [the year 2000] seriously could shut the whole supply chain down." Sidestepping such difficulties, however, may be a task likened to trying to extricate oneself from quicksand--that is, the more effort you make, the deeper in you get. With some of the embedded shop-floor software widely in use today, companies will have to do some serious digging just to get to the bottom of the problem. "You are basically going to have to track down, through layers and layers of manufacturers, some of whom may not be in business anymore, how to deal with a potential century problem [in equipment they sold you]," says Marsha Williams, information-technology manager for Cobe Cardiovascular Inc., a subsidiary of Lakewood, Colo.-based Cobe Laboratories Inc. Cobe manufactures $160 million worth of operating-room and related equipment annually. Further complicating the challenges facing many manufacturers is the increasing complexity of--and dependency on--today's supply chain. In the automotive industry, for instance, it's becoming more and more difficult to trace the path of a part or component in a clear, linear fashion. "If you look at something like a [car] seat," says Joe Bione, a consultant with Deloitte Consulting's Detroit office, "there are three or four main suppliers. They all supply each other with components, and their extended enterprises all cross over to each other. So when someone does not provide a part that goes into another part that goes into a seat, you don't make too many seats. And there is no inventory in the system to allow for that error." Bione serves as lead global consulting partner for Chrysler Corp. and as Deloitte Consulting's lead partner on a Year-2000 task force sponsored by the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), Southfield, Mich. industryweek.com The Real Year 2000 Nightmare: Manufacturing Systems Jan 5 '98 EXCELLENT ARTICLE Worth printing out - Plus you can read about what TAVA has to say. FYI: Unilever tripled their Y2K budget after TAVA did assessment. Blamed it on "embedded systems". Cheryl