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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeff Redman who wrote (3672)	2/5/1999 2:32:00 PM
From: B.K.Myers	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9818

Jeff, It appears that you are correct. I could not find any reports of “massive” problems at Kraft Foods as a result of the 1/1/1999 rollover. The only problems that I could find that Kraft Foods experienced occurred before the 1/1/1999 rollover. This is old news, but in case you missed it: The Year 2000 in Industrial and Process Control Systems Conference was held in Houston, May 18-20, 1998. The conference was hosted by the International Quality and Productivity Center. A session was put on by Evan Hand, a Kraft engineer who talked about what Kraft was doing about its embedded systems problems. Kraft Foods has more than fifty manufacturing and distribution centers and more than 50 co-manufacturers with over 55,000 potential problems. They also have to assure the compliance of 5000 vendor products. At the beginning of his talk, Mr. Hand told the audience that he would give them an overall view of the remediation effort at Kraft, then he would get into specifics and give them the actual numbers. Kraft has already had some year 2000 problems surface. Several million dollars worth of food was destroyed because the food expiration date was after the millennium. Because of two digit date encoding, the warehouse had processed the shipments as expired and destroyed them. Kraft has tested 832 Programmable Logic Controllers so far and had found 10% of them to have a date capability, a higher number then they had initially estimated. He also talked about what kind of problem the tested machines had such as a subtraction problem or date roll over. At Kraft, the PLCs control safety and food production, so any glitch will shut down the whole line. (This report was posted in a Y2k mailing list) silicon.net.my It appears to me that the several million dollar food destruction was sufficient enough to cause Kraft Foods to take the Y2K problem seriously and maybe they have identified and corrected enough of the problems to keep the macaroni and cheese flowing. My hat's off to Kraft Foods for what appears to be a job well done (so far).