Shutdown blamed on Y2K bug

Factory closes due to botched orders Wednesday, December 6, 2000

The Associated Press

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Colebrook

COLEBROOK - A Quebec-based window manufacturer blames the Y2K bug for closing its Colebrook plant that employs between 60 and 125 people.

Bonneville Window, one of Canada's leading window manufacturers, announced Monday it was closing the plant Dec. 15.

The Colebrook Development Corp. worked for more than a year in the early 1990s to bring the manufacturer to town in 1994 after the departure of Bose, one of the largest employers at the time.

"This has nothing to do with production in Colebrook or the economy," said Andre LeBlanc, president and chief operating officer of Bonneville's parent company, Groupe Bocenor, based in St. Marie de Beauce, Quebec. "It has everything to do with the fact that we are a very rare victim of Y2K."

In March 1999, company officials were told that their computer system was not ready for the changeover to the year 2000 last January, LeBlanc said.

"At that point, changing a system at five minutes to midnight meant we had to buy a system off the shelf," he said. "We could have bought an American package, but that would be a problem for our employees, who are uni-lingual Francophones. We opted for a smaller Quebec company, which was not adequate to meet the demands for our company."

The new computer system would erase orders entered into it, he said.

"When it failed, we couldn't deliver orders on time," he said. "We would enter an order for 400 in the morning and it would be erased by the afternoon. It was hair raising and demoralizing."

LeBlanc said Bonneville, the company's only manufacturing operation in the United States, probably would have pulled out of Colebrook sometime in the next year anyway.

"In 1992, the decision to go to Colebrook were for reasons that aren't applicable in today's economy," he said. The plant produced PVC windows, which were in great demand eight years ago.

The closing came as a blow to Colebrook, where jobs are hard to come by.

The closing is expected to double the unemployment rate from 2.7 percent.

"It's a real disappointment," said Jim Tibbetts, president of Colebrook Bank and a member of the Colebrook Development Corp. "Unemployment is as low as it has ever been, but putting 60 employees into the marketplace is hard in a community of 2,500."

http://www.cmonitor.com/stories/news/state/nh__y2kvictim_08y26y34.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 06, 2000