It's been about two months since I last posted here, it's been busy. I keep hearing people say that small businesses won't be impacted by Y2K because they're running PC's. That's just not true. I've lost count of the number of businesses I've been into where half or more of the computers on their network are non-compliant.(Our company has personally seen this number hit 70% or higher for some time now.) The figure runs about the same for operating systems and applications. And yes, I've seen some cases where it honestly wouldn't make any difference because of how they use their systems. But those cases are few and far between. The majority fall into one of two classes. Class one will fail on rollover as in, "Mr. Smith, I can't seem to enter these invoices." Class two will look normal, but a week, month, or quarter down the road, someone will say, "These reports don't look right; you haven't been turning these figures into the X agency have you?"

Every small business owner I've talked with seems to think that his people will work around the problem. It's the guy down the street that's going to be in trouble. The big picture appears to me to be that when a large number of small biz's are having moderate problems, with some having severe problems, it's going to have a cumulative effect. Maybe I'm wrong, somebody please tell me how a decent percentage of the small businesses can stand to wait an extra 60 or 90 days for their A/R to come in. I just don't see the extra cash there now.

By the way, I posted back in Dec. that I would be speaking to a group of about 400 in Jan.99. I did, and it went really well if you discount the one old guy in the front row that yelled out bull**** about halfway through. Just an update.

-- Greg Sugg (gregsugg@bbnp.com), March 16, 1999

Answers

I work with manufacturers in the Southeast Michigan area an d one word comes to mind: clueless. They don't see the "big picture". They think that they'll fix-on-failure. They haven't really looked at the compliant of their suppliers. "I can't worry about 2000 because I haven't started worrying about next week." "We checked that Feb. 29, 2000 date and we're fine." "What can we do?" "What's the Y2K problem" (that happened at a magnet manufacturer last week). I don't want to scare the DWGI or DGI, but I'll go on because they dgi. Generally, NO concept of the problem. "I just send in those suppliers surveys and say we're fine" an actual quote and attitude pervasive. If they don't know what the problem is, how will the manufacturing community have a solution??

-- PJC (paulchri@msn.com), March 16, 1999.