Project - Y2K

With the Year 2000 approaching I promoted that the company work early to ensure that all of the manufacturing, business systems, and company developed software would remain available.

Goal:

• Ensure all manufacturing and business processing equipment is Year 2000 compliant

Corporate

Reviewed all of the computing, network, telecommunications, PLC, manufacturing, and Internet devices for both the office and manufacturing plant and identified any adjustments or updates required to make them Y2K compliant. Worked with suppliers to source updates or replacement hardware / software as required, and applied or replaced as downtime allowed.

Software Development

Updated the in-house software development environment, ensuring Y2K compliance with all software and controls. For the software that was provided to our customers, I mastered a Y2K fix in with a regular software update, ensuring our customer base did not experience any down time and that the provided software would continue to function as required.

Customers

As customers became aware of the Y2K issue, upon their request I performed similar Y2K evaluations on their computers and networks using remote tools or during regular scheduled visits (traveling with the Regional Manager). Recognizing that some of our customers had computers that did not have Internet access, nor the technical staff required to apply Year 2000 patches to their computers running Microsoft Windows, I provided the patches on the software distribution media so that the customers did not need to download the updates from Microsoft, and included instructions (and telephone support) so they could install the patches themselves.  The provided patches were configured in such a way as to allow the customer to run one simple command and have the appropriate patches applied. The software also included an application that checked the computer BIOS to see if it would be affected, advising the customer appropriately.

Results

The project was successful with no Y2K issues affecting the company, provided software, or customer computer systems. Customers were very grateful to have received the Y2K patches. I only had a few instances where customers (feeling it was all hype) had not applied the patches, and were unable to boot their computers in Jan 2000. Of course, this helped to strengthen customer relations.