Prudential, one of Australasia's leading managers of superannuation and investments, has teamed up with management and technology consultants, PA Consulting Group, to help put the 'Millennium Bug' at the top of its business agenda and implement an efficient solution to the date change crisis.
Prudential's Year 2000 project team, which has been tackling the problem since the beginning of the year, is made up of staff from Prudential's business and IT divisions, PA consultants and systems integrators, ISSC.
Taking advantage of PA Consulting Group's project management support skills, Prudential is finalising the analysis and planning stage, which will provide specific plans and enable the project team to co-ordinate the implementation phase of the process. The combination of these specialist skills will allow Prudential to complete all the changes as early as December next year.
Andrew Hanna, Business Project Manager at Prudential, said: "I'm confident that we are well ahead of most Australian businesses who are still struggling to get senior management to recognise that a problem exists, let alone commit to solving it.
"Our senior management team's commitment to the Year 2000 issue has allowed us to take a business-focused approach to solving the problem. PA's role in providing high level consultancy is critical for the success of this project."
Byram Johnston from PA Consulting Group, added: "It's important not to under-estimate the size of a problem which many companies are not yet even aware of. Prudential is using its skills to identify where software compliance may affect the business, prioritising its needs and then implementing changes as quickly as possible. We are delighted to be working with them and hope that other companies are inspired to tackle their Year 2000 problem in a similar way." During the implementation stage, which begins in August, Prudential is expected to recruit a number of COBOL, Assembler and C programmers to convert the 7 million lines of code which sit at the core of its heterogeneous IT systems, made up of legacy mainframe applications, client/server networks and several software packages.
PA Consulting Group was awarded the contract as a result of an earlier successful joint project with Prudential and is working with the company's offices in Australia and New Zealand. The project is being co-ordinated from Prudential's Sydney headquarters.
Millennium Bug
The problem arises from computer systems which have been written to recognise only two digits for the year component of the date, for example '97' for 1997. For applications in the twentieth century this is fine; however, as the year 2000 approaches, systems will interpret '00' as 1900 rather than 2000, causing major problems in the validation, display, calculation, storage and printing of data. With the potential for incorrect date processing, businesses will be unable to process orders, dispatch invoices, calculate payments, process transactions and so on. Non-IT systems, such as security systems, elevators and electricity meters, could also be affected. Analysts predict that the Millennium Bug could put 3% of companies out of business and could affect whole economies if disaster recovery plans are not implemented.
