Companies Reviewing Plans as New Millennium Nears
The i’s have been dotted, the t’s crossed and the numbers crunched.
Now, most of the San Fernando Valley’s largest corporate citizens are spending the final weeks before Y2K reviewing their contingency plans and making sure all bases will be covered for the big rollover.
Companies that process large volumes of information daily, such as banks and insurers, are gearing up for what they hope will be an uneventful New Year. But different conditions at each firm mean the approach to ensuring a smooth transition varies from shop to shop.
At Countrywide Credit Industries in Calabasas, for example, data processing is expected to straddle the date line from one year to the next, as a combined staff of about 300 technicians at various facilities nationwide look on, said Patricia Bramhall, senior vice president of information technology for the home mortgage giant. The company would usually have about one-third as many technicians coming in over the holiday, she said.
“This was a huge effort to do this business continuity,” she said. “We did a specific simulation for the [new] millennium weekend in October. We also had made-up problems, like a virus, all specific to the [new] millennium. Now we’ve got everybody ready. I will be there when the clock turns over in our Simi Valley data center. That’s where our [new] millennium command center is.”
Concern may be greatest among data-intensive companies that process thousands of transactions daily, but other, less data-intensive firms, such as entertainment and aerospace companies, also have contingency plans.
Litton Industries has spent recent weeks developing such plans for its own systems and those used by its customers and vendors, said Randy Velote, spokesman for the Woodland Hills-based aerospace giant. In the customer arena, for example, Litton’s staff will be standing by to make sure all is well with the company’s airline navigation systems that guide many of the world’s commercial planes.
On the entertainment end of the Valley, Universal Studios Hollywood is so confident of its Y2K readiness that its planning a massive New Year’s Eve bash at the theme park, said spokesman Eliot Sekuler. In addition to the usual rides, the park will host concerts on four sound stages featuring music entertainment by Chaka Khan, Berlin, Missing Persons and Yari More. About 15,000 people are expected.
In a move to head off any potential Y2K problems, the park will temporarily shut down its four operating rides--Terminator 2: 3-D; Jurassic Park--The Ride; Back to the Future; and Backdraft--at 11:45 p.m. New Year’s Eve, Sekuler said. Those rides will be tested just after midnight to make sure everything is working, and then people will be allowed back on.
“We have backup generators on the premises and a full set of wide-ranging contingency plans well worked out for any eventuality--every scenario you could imagine,” he said.
Across the board, big companies say they are prepared.
“Most of the major corporations are done--they’re finished with their remediation work, doing the inventory, finding out what products and solutions they have in place that are hardware or software dependent,” said Andrea Daly, a senior manager at Arthur Andersen and former head of its Year 2000 Practice Development. “What they’re doing now is either finishing their contingency planning or working on it.”
Foundation Health Systems in Woodland Hills finished retooling and retesting its computer systems last month and is focusing on “insurance activities” in the remaining weeks of 1999, said Erin Mendez, vice president of information technology planning for the managed health care giant, which has about 5.5 million members nationwide.
“We’re going to print out reports, and chances are we’ll never use them,” she said. Foundation, like all of its corporate peers, has detailed plans to monitor the changeover from New Year’s Eve to New Year’s Day.
A staff of about 75 will be on hand at the company’s data center in Rancho Cordova, while Mendez and 25-30 other data personnel will be on duty in Woodland Hills. The company plans to process its daily transactions and produce December and year-end reports before midnight Dec. 31. The computers will then go idle for the changeover, and various systems will be brought back up in the hours soon after midnight.
“You normally don’t bring the systems back up so soon,” Mendez said. “You usually bring them up around 6 or 7 in the morning, but we’re going to bring them up somewhere close after midnight to make sure they come up and they’re still in the right state they were in before.”
Nearby, at 20th Century Insurance Co., which will become 21st Century Insurance Co. on Jan. 1, much of the remediation and retesting work were completed months ago, said Mike Farrell, chief information officer of the auto insurance specialist.
“We were complete with everything except the contingency plan as of July,” he said. “We’ve been fine-tuning the contingency plan over the last few months. From Thanksgiving on, we had a freeze on all changes to our technical environment so we wouldn’t have any changes” to systems that were modified to be Y2K compliant.
At this point, 20th Century is finalizing plans to monitor its situation on New Year’s Eve and into Jan. 1, Farrell said. “We’re looking at who’s going to be on site, and the hour-to-hour procedures of what they’ll do,” he said. “We’ll have about 12 people at Woodland Hills during the changeover.”
Like Foundation Health, 20th Century intends to keep its computers running but largely idle during the actual transition from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1.
In Westlake Village, meanwhile, Pinkerton USA is facing a different new millennium crunch altogether, said Mark Leaf, spokesman for the security services giant.
Many of Pinkerton’s clients have requested extra security personnel for New Year’s Eve in the event that problems develop, he said.
Pinkerton has spent the last few weeks training its guards on how to react in a number of Y2K scenarios, from loss of power to shut down of electronic security systems to inability to get home after a shift, according to Leaf. Security officers also have been notified that everyone will be working over the new millennium weekend.
“This year, it’s basically an all-hands-on-deck operation, by which all of our security officers will be working during the holiday period,” he said.
“Certainly, not every individual will be on during the transition to the new year, but all of our officers nationally will be in service at client sites during the week leading up to and several days after the new year.”
