July 29, 1998

 

Standard Register: A Case Study of a Y2K Project

 

Standard Register, an Ohio-based document management and business forms company, is approaching its Y2K project a little differently than most: Break it into pieces, remediate and then test. The project is well under way and the company plans on complete compliance by 1999.

 

"We initially started looking at a preassessment in February 1997," says David Hoskins, program manager for Standard Register's Y2K effort. "We did some initial gathering of information and looked for a solutions provider to partner with."

 

Hoskins was reassigned from another department to head the company's project. In July 1997, with Hoskins at the helm, the formal assessment was begun. "We took what we had learned from our preassessment and surveys and then conducted interviews with other companies to get an idea of how large a project we were looking at."

 

Standard Register chose Computer Sciences Corp. as a partner to aid in the assessment and later to help with remediation efforts.

 

"People say there is no positive side to Y2K," says Karen Kirwan, director of information systems. "But Y2K afforded our company the opportunity to take stock. I now have a full application inventory of every application--its language and age."

 

With the assessment under their belt, the Y2K staff at Standard adopted the British Standards Institution Committee's Year 2000 definition:

 

 

 

•No value for current date will cause any interruption in operation. •Data-based functionality must behave consistently for dates prior to, during and after year 2000. •In all interfaces and data storage, the century in any date must be specified either explicitly or by unambiguous algorithms or inferencing rules. •Year 2000 must be recognized as a leap year.

 

 

 

Standard Register is using Compuware's Suite of QA Run and QA Director for its client/server environment and Hyperstation on its mainframes for record and playback tools. Any code that can't be updated in-house is shipped to CSC's remediation factory in Lexington, Mass.

 

Before signing up with CSC, Hoskins and his crew spoke with other companies about their experiences with off-shore code conversion.

 

"We chose not to send our code out of the country," says Kirwan. "No one we spoke with had a positive experience and we didn't know what we'd get back from an overseas remediation factory. I think it is just as cost-effective this way."

 

What makes Standard's project stand out in the crowd is the company's overall method of tackling Y2K. "Rather than do across-the-board testing and then remediate, we work in releases. We take an application and if it needs renovation we do it and then test," says Hoskins. "We started with our bread-and-butter applications and are working our way down our list of priorities."

 

To keep upper management apprised of Y2K project status, Hoskins meets with Standard's top-level executives every two months to discuss cost, schedule and other Y2K business. "We are in constant communication with the business unit of our company," says Hoskins. "In every part of our project we met with subject matter experts who advised us on how the particular system behaved and how to test it."

 

Despite the company's optimistic outlook, they still may run into problems come Jan. 1, 2000. "This is a difficult journey for everyone," says Kirwan. "The largest risk we face is our supply chain. We are just a link in the chain and whoever isn't ready outside our parameters can cause problems with our compliance."

 

Kirwan credits the project's smooth sailing to communication. "There is an excellent rapport between our Y2K team and our upper executives," she says.

 

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