Saturday, October 27, 2018

My Work Experience – Part 4



While I was still stepping in as needed to write code for difficult situations, by the mid-90’s I was no longer spending my time in coding.  Rather, I was helping to lead others who were doing the actual coding.  I was not their supervisor, but was floating between projects as the need arose.  In many cases I was giving technical advice to people who were coding in languages and on platforms that I myself had never actually used.  Two things happened that made this transition complete.

The first was Y2K.  All the way back in 1980 I had designed a generalized date routine for the company that did all the needed date calculations – getting the current date, changes date formats, calculating the difference between two dates, etc.  As a result, many of our applications were insulated from Y2K as this date routine took it into account and would work until 2040.  But there were still many applications that would fail when the change of century occurred.  I had been the lone voice asking for this problem to be worked on for many years, but no one was listening.  Finally, I received permission from my manager to work on the corporate accounts receivable system, correct any faulty date logic, and document what the impact of the new century would have been if the changes had not been made.  The results stunned everyone.  Beginning in January of 2000, all accounts would be flagged as past due and interest charged to each customer with an outstanding balance, and any payments received would be dropped as having invalid dates and simply rejected – with no way to correct them except to rekey them from scratch.  Because of those results, I finally convinced management that we needed to address this issue.  The issue was too big for one person to handle, so one of the most senior project managers in IT was given overall responsibility and I worked on the team to address all the gas group systems.  This included all our gas group subsidiaries and joint ventures around the world – so I had a series of trips to all our major international locations to document their systems and work with their local IT staff to address any issues. 

On the night of the century rollover, I was on duty the entire night.  The VP of operations was also on duty and as Y2K rolled through each time zone the plants were being shut down before midnight, restarted after midnight, and the results called in to him.  Despite all that we had done, I logged over 60 failures, mostly minor ones, around the world.  The only ones with any financial impact were (1) the executive payroll system took out the deductions from each executive’s paycheck twice instead of once [that was a system I was not allowed to inspect because it was too sensitive], and (2) a computer in one of our facilities that logged the amount of product being imported via pipeline from a government plant calculated a negative amount of product for the hour that spanned midnight and gave us a credit instead of a charge [because the PC it ran on was a government PC instead of ours we had not been allowed to touch or examine it.]

The second incident was our (failed) attempt to buy out one of our competitors.  While the headquarters of both companies were in the US, we each had a network of subsidiaries and joint ventures around the world.  We had a large IT staff putting together a plan for how to integrate the two companies in the US, but just myself and one other person worrying about all the international locations.  I had been put on the team because of my Y2K experience.  So even without travelling to any of our competitor locations, I had put together a detailed plan on how to do the integration.  Management was impressed with the plan I had developed.  While the acquisition did not come to pass because of FTC objections (that’s another story that I will not include here), I became known as the international expert within IT – so much so that I knew more about our international structure than even the corporate secretary and I helped update the corporate records on our percentage of JV ownership (see below for more detail).

The result of these two situations meant that I had now totally divorced myself from the technical area (although I still had all that knowledge as an asset) and was the expert in our international operations.  Thus “rebranded”, I entered the final phase of my career at Air Products.



I had spent the four years prior to 2000 making the transition.  For the rest of my working years in the new decade I was still in IT, but with a very different focus – that of being an advocate and business analyst for all our international subsidiaries and joint ventures.  There were several facets to this new focus.

Defining the company – In the process of wanting to know where the company did business and where there might be Y2K problems, I had explored our ownership position of the various subsidiaries and joint ventures.  Some of what I found conflicted with information that was kept by other departments, specifically the corporate secretary’s office and the corporate tax office.  The former is supposed to be the “owner” of our ownership position, the latter cares about taxability, but stops caring whenever the total ownership position drops below 50%.  I ended up forming a small working group with representatives of those two offices and myself.  The definitions of things like “ownership”, “liability”, and “control” can be very convoluted but we needed to have a consistent view of them at the corporate level.  It’s complicated when you directly own X% of company Q, but then you also own Y% of company P which then owns Z% of the same company Q.  I also suggested some new wording for the standard wording that went on all corporate press releases: “… does business in __ countries …” as well as the language regarding how many employees the company had (it’s established at the beginning of a fiscal year and is published unchanged for the next 12 months even as company changes are made).  For IT to take the lead in such matters was quite unprecedented.

Standardizing computer hardware/software – One of our goals was to replace the hodge-podge of computer systems around the world that had resulted from either acquisitions over time or of each country going their own way in the absence of corporate standards.  The object was to make them consistent so you could take your company-issued laptop to any installation in the world, find a green Ethernet cable and log on to the network just as if you’d been at your own desk.  It took a couple of years to get this all done, but I led the effort to do so and this had huge benefits later.

Standardizing systems – At one time we counted 38 different order entry systems being used within the company.  There were several in various divisions in the US and when you added the international segment the numbers skyrocketed.  This usually also meant that there were several different accounting systems, complicating the function of reporting total sales figures for example.  The decision was made to replace all our homegrown systems with standardized purchased software, namely SAP.  The prior project to standardize our network paved the way to make this possible.  While I was not officially a part of the SAP team, I was often the lead person presenting this concept to both local IT and local business management, so I had to be pretty familiar with what they were going to be encountering and alleviate their fears.

Building relationships – One very important function was for me to establish relationships with the people in each country/subsidiary.  I needed to develop a level of trust as I was the voice/face of the company to them.  I also needed to be able to accurately represent them whenever decisions were being made in Allentown that affected them.  I found that a face-to-face meeting every two years would suffice as long as there was regular email/phone contact in between.  I also get very good at both understanding and speaking ESL (English as a Second Language).  Being able to communicate in a way that I could be understood directly was an extremely valuable skill.  Most of my IT colleagues either talked too fast or used too many figures of speech or complicated words to be easily understood.  I made many good friends around the world, even though I generally limited my travel to only one major trip per year (but usually with multiple stops in different countries in that part of the world).

Standing in the gap – There were a few occasions where I had to provide direct technical support.  For example, a couple of people in our Brazilian subsidiary were fired due to some improper actions.  Brazil has one of the most complicated tax structures in the world and some spreadsheets used by one of the fired individuals were critical to complying with these tax laws.  I stepped in and designed a new system that would automate the complicated calculations so we could close the books in a timely manner each month.  The night of the first closing I was on duty in my office in the US while the new finance manager in Brazil was running the closing from her office in Sao Paulo.  I had access to the server in Brazil so I could help make the necessary final tweaks. 



I had been saying for many years that I did not have a retirement date in mind – that I would keep working for as long as it was still “fun.”  While when I began saying this I meant that I might continue working after age 65, the “fun” ended quite a bit before then.

The company had gone through many reorganizations since I had been hired over 30 years before.  There were always changes and that was a way of life that I was used to.  But in the latest one I found myself with a new manager who happened to be British and he brought with him a new way of doing things.  This included that every task had to be done the same way by everyone.  It didn’t matter whether it was a relatively new hire in their mid-20’s in the UK or myself in my mid-50’s with 30 years of company background and knowledge.  And he did not believe in compromising this view.

The company as a whole was also undergoing change (again).  They were on a “quality” kick that was all about elimination of “waste” and “unproductive” time.  We had had similar campaigns in the past, but now “waste” extended down to the fact that if you took a bathroom break you were being unproductive.  Or if you were conversing with a fellow employee in the hall, even if it was about a mutual problem you hoped to solve, that wasn’t a formal meeting and so was unproductive.  The “fun” had left – and in a big way. 

Even though I was only 58, in the fall of 2006 I announced my retirement.  Rather than the typical two week notice, I announced it six months in advance, allowing a lot of time for the transition.  As it turned out, I was on the leading edge of a great exodus of experienced IT folks.  Over the next two years, there were dozens of “retirements” of my compatriots.  Some even left before I did by not giving as much notice.  And my fears were not unfounded.  As I visited a few times in the following years, or as others of my fellow IT retirees did the same, the mood had changed.  There were no people in the halls, there was dead silence – people were either “heads down” in their offices, or in meetings.  The “fun” of working for the company had died.  Not only had things like defined benefit pension plans been eliminated (that happened a few years earlier but I had been “grandfathered” in), but the feeling of contributing to the company and the willingness to give long hours because you felt valued had gone away.  Now it was just a job and not a career.  (As I write this, the company has just gone through another such reorganization – to operating totally regionally or by country.  As such, they are in the process of eliminating much of their home office staff – approximately 30%.  Not fun at all any more!)

I didn’t regret leaving but I didn’t regret my time working there either.  But it was the end of an era and I’m glad I left when I did.


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