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Strategies & Market Trends : Bill Wexler's Profits of DOOM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: big run who wrote (1621)	7/17/1998 12:30:00 AM
From: WR	Respond to of 4634

Wish I could answer your question but I can't. But that is what was said in Fortune Magazine. Here is some more from the same article: At first, factory types who warned of impending troubles were regarded somewhat like alarmist Chicken Littles, says Terry Landano, a manager grappling with the 2000 challenge at BASF Corp. in Mount Olive, N.J. Her company, a subsidiary of Germany's BASF, makes paints and plastics for the auto industry as well as fibers, vitamins, and chemicals. Landano recalls: "The top executives would ask: 'What, are you kidding? How could these two little digits be such a problem?' " So for a long time manufacturing companies snoozed, including GM. When he arrived at the automotive giant a year and a half ago to take over the CIO job, recalls Ralph Szygenda, he was amazed "that most people assumed that the factory floor didn't have year 2000 problems." Szygenda, with experience in manufacturing at Texas Instruments, didn't settle for assumptions. He shook GM out of its slumber by turning to outside companies such as Deloitte & Touche and Raytheon Engineers & Constructors, specialists in solving the problem, which sent in 91 experts to assess the automaker's situation. Supplemented by squads of GM technicians and programmers, these experts fanned out through GM's 117 facilities in 35 countries. What they found shocked even the factory-wise Szygenda. "At each one of our factories there are catastrophic problems," says the blunt-talking executive. "Amazingly enough, machines on the factory floor are far more sensitive to incorrect dates than we ever anticipated. When we tested robotic devices for transition into the year 2000, for example, they just froze and stopped operating." Szygenda quickly placed manufacturing facilities at the top of the list of the three "most dangerous" year 2000 areas at GM, followed by the company's supply base and the portion of businesswide software systems that supports production controls and logistic processes. Now, says Szygenda, "we're working feverishly and fast" to get the problem under control. All by itself, GM has two billion lines of software to check. The company is also retiring 1,700 obsolete computer systems. Attacking the year 2000 problem has exposed another major area of vulnerability for GM: its 100,000 suppliers worldwide. Will all be compliant? Modern manufacturing's mastery of just-in-time parts delivery and business-to-business electronic commerce has created a beast that can bite it. Szygenda knows all too well how, on occasion, labor strife or a problem at a key supplier has shut down GM plants. "Just-in-time delivery has streamlined our supply chain to make it highly sensitive to any interruption," he says. "Production could literally stop at our plants if suppliers' computer systems are not year 2000 compliant. pathfinder.com