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Y2K speed demon

PC Week Online
June 7, 1999 

Time is running out in the race to gain year 2000 compliance, but Ronald Kasprack is confident he'll make it to the finish line. This despite the fact that in January, Kasprack, IT support manager at Thomas & Betts Corp., was just beginning the remediation process.

Even with the late start, Kasprack is sure the Memphis, Tenn., Fortune 500 electrical component manufacturer will act swiftly enough to get the job done. That's because he's outfitted his IT team with quick-fix Y2K tools, outsourcing partners and lots of ambition.

Kasprack and his crew are moving at full throttle. Barely five months into remediation, Kasprack said he will have all of his mission-critical applications tested and back in production by September, although he admits that some nonproduction applications may go into testing just under the wire. Realistically, he knows that Y2K success depends upon careful prioritizing and planning.

"What will keep the business going is our approach to this process," Kasprack said. "We went with automated software, and we fixed our most critical applications first."

Automating the process with a quick-fix approach is where he may have taken the road less traveled. While many Y2K managers go through code line by line and manually change it, Kasprack decided to save time by running his mainframe code through Data Integrity Inc.'s Millennium Solution.

Thomas & Betts hired three independent contractors to deploy the Data Integrity tool and do the compliance work, while the in-house IT staff concentrated on moving financial and human resource applications off an IBM mainframe and onto Sun Microsystems Inc. servers.

At this late date, it was a good decision to bring in automation tools and extra hands to divide the work, according to Andrew Bochman, an analyst with Boston-based Aberdeen Group. Other IT managers who may feel they are beyond the Y2K curve could learn from Thomas & Betts' experience that it's never too late to get a company in gear and on the right track. In fact, IT executives just beginning remediation or behind in compliance testing need to think like Kasprack, Bochman said.

"People just starting remediation now have to pick and choose," he said. Bochman also added that "people starting now will not get through testing, but automated software may [help] get them as far as they can get."

Wired for speed

"We had to do a number of projects to ensure success. This was just too critical," Kasprack said.

To that end, he first used JCL to identify all of the production jobs that are executed on a daily basis. Those applications that came up critical to the business were scheduled for conversion first. Then, he moved some of the general ledger and human resource legacy applications to, respectively, Oracle Corp.'s and SAP AG's applications running on Solaris servers.

At the same time, Kasprack and his IT team used MHtran-2/MVS from Prince Software Inc. to rewrite the applications that would remain on the mainframe--such as the order-entry system program--into a newer version of COBOL.

When it came time to fix the COBOL programs, Kasprack looked at products from Compuware Corp., Data Integrity, Platinum Technology Inc. and Viasoft Inc. to see which would work quickly and efficiently. He asked all of the vendors to run tests on a proprietary online CICS order-entry application, which had 37,000 lines of code as well as a batch program with 18,000 lines of code.

With more than 3,000 applications to fix and validate, Kasprack said he chose Data Integrity's Millennium Solution for--what else--its speed and ease of use.

While most remediation approaches look for field descriptors based on a predefined list of keywords that indicate data usage, Millennium Solution searches for mathematical programming commands such as "sort" and "perform until."

"The program was able to go through 37,000 lines in 5 minutes and make the appropriate fixes," he said. "That kind of speed and efficiency was impressive."

Impressive, perhaps. But does it work? Apparently it does.

This month, Kasprack began simulation of his mission-critical applications, including order entry, which are now back into production. But as successful as this late-start remediation has been, don't expect Kasprack to be racing off to ring in the new year.

"I'm pretty confident with what we've done," he said. "But like everyone else, I'll be on call."
By Anne Chen
 

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