Where was never any question in Dave Hubbert’s mind that something drastic was needed. The year was 1994, and Reltec Corp., then Reliance Electric, was a conglomerate of smaller telecommunications equipment manufacturers, each of which had its own independent computer network system.
Hubbert, the company’s Y2K program manager, had been tabbed to bring the company into compliance with the millennium bug. Rather than apply a Band-Aid cure to the company’s existing systems, Hubbert and his team of engineers embarked on a $31 million overhaul that not only addressed Y2K problems, but linked up all of Reltec’s locations into one connected network system.
The initial network conversion took two full years, explains Hubbert, and laid the groundwork for Reltec’s extensive Y2K compliance program, which began as 1996 was winding down.
“We could have spent a lot of money and time just addressing Y2K,” Hubbert says. “But it wouldn’t have even begun to solve our long-term needs.”
Reltec’s program addressed the company’s major business systems first, ensuring that they would be up and running when the Year 2000 rolled around. After launching that project, Hubbert’s team turned its attention to other aspects of Reltec’s business. Each area had a target date, ranging from late 1998 through early 1999. The goal was to be completely Y2K compliant by mid-September.
To reach their target date, Hubbert and his staff employed a seven-step approach, relying on common sense rather than getting caught up in the hype surrounding the millennium bug.
Build awareness
Hubbert’s first step was making management aware of the company’s Y2K problem, then receiving a commitment to resolve it. That, he says, was the easy part.
Like other large corporations, Reltec formed study groups to analyze its critical systems and determine whether the Y2K bug would, indeed, infect its businesses.
It didn’t take long for management to develop a comprehensive compliance policy, which required Reltec to define and complete a formal Year 2000 program and bring its systems into compliance.
Take inventory of your critical systems
Hubbert says that once company brass committed to tackling the millennium bug and upgrading Reltec’s systems, his staff identified the tools needed to undertake the enormous project.
“You look at your own systems and realize you’re dependent on those systems for your business,” explains Hubbert. “If they failed, we wouldn’t be able to conduct business. Once you realize that, you can take the next step and begin addressing the problems.”
Determine the impact of a systems failure
Hubbert and his team analyzed Reltec’s critical systems and determined what would happen to the company if the systems failed, such as loss of their database, an inability to process customer orders and snafus in the product development line. They established priorities and set up a project schedule, beginning with the major business systems.
They also targeted the supply chain. That was crucial, because while internal problems were the primary focus, no business exists in a vacuum.
“If you address your internal problems and don’t look outside the company, you’re setting yourself up for more severe problems down the road,” explains Hubbert. “So we looked next at our key suppliers and asked them what they were doing to prepare.”
Hubbert also addressed the company’s minor business systems, its EDI software, Reltec’s product line, the design and manufacturing departments and the company’s general infrastructure.
Assess your situation
Once the implications of Y2K failures were determined, the team set out to locate where each problem would be, what solutions were available and the resources required to complete it within the team’s designated time window.
Explains Hubbert, “We knew that one-third of the Y2K failures would occur some time in 1999. That’s because areas such as our material requirements planning system ordered materials in advance, sometimes as far as six months in advance. That meant we’d be placing orders for January 2000 in June 1999. And if our systems couldn’t handle placement of those orders, we’d be in real trouble.”
Those assessments led to a resolution plan.
Develop a plan
The plan called for step-by-step system upgrades, rewriting code and documentation and eliminating trouble spots that wouldn’t recognize the year 2000. Despite beginning with plenty of time to spare, Hubbert encountered his share of surprises along the way.
“Several systems we thought were Y2K compliant weren’t,” he says. “We found that when we tried to print reports, that when we sorted them into date sequence, 00 was sorted before 99. We also kept finding systems that gave us error messages and said that 00 was not a valid date.”
Work out the bugs
Testing began last winter, nearly two years after the Y2K compliance program began. Even then, Hubbert and his team found that their changes weren’t perfect. “We had a customer late last year who tried to place an order for delivery in 2000,” he says. “When we tried to book the delivery date and enter it into the system, we found out it wouldn’t accept it. And that’s when people who thought Y2K wasn’t as big an issue as it’s been made out to be realized it was real and saw how it could effectively cripple a system.”
Fire up the engines
Once they’d worked out the bugs in each system, one by one they were activated as Y2K compliant. Data was converted to the new system, electronic partners were certified for similar compliance, and Hubbert and his team of engineers made each new system live.
“So far, we’ve met our dates,” he says. “You have to provide continuity to a company so that you can conduct business on a day-to-day level without interruption. That’s what we were trying to do. And it was a process that took us several years.” How to reach: Reltec, (440) 460-3600
Dustin Klein ([email protected]) is editor of SBN Cleveland.
