PHILADELPHIA -- A new generic electronic data interchange message is being developed to enable retailers to test Year-2000 compliance of their EDI systems as well as those of their trading partners. The test EDI message is expected to be available early next year. Expressing concerns voiced by retailers in all classes of trade, Vivian M. Stephenson, senior vice president and chief information officer for Dayton Hudson, Minneapolis, said ensuring Year-2000 compliance among all partners within the supply chain -- including vendors -- is getting "high visibility."
"It is a big issue because we deal with a substantial number of vendors. We've put a program in place for checking the compliance of all our suppliers," Stephenson said during a session at the Retail Information Systems Conference here, sponsored by the National Retail Federation, Washington.
The electronic test message is being constructed by the NRF's Survival 2000 committee. The NRF plans to develop a draft of the test EDI message by the end of November and to release the final version in January 1998, said Cathy Hotka, the NRF's vice president of information technology.
"The situation is that a lot of retailers cannot go back to doing business on paper," said Hotka. "Our goal is to develop a 'vanilla' EDI message that will alert the retailer and the supplier if their systems cannot deal with the year 2000."
In addition to assessing the Year-2000 compliance of their suppliers' computer systems, retailers are looking at equipment such as elevators, air conditioning units and conveyor belts that are computer-driven but don't normally come under the scrutiny of the information systems department.
Dayton Hudson is now doing a "full court press" to look at Year-2000 compliance for systems that typically fall outside the radar screen of the information systems department, Stephenson said. "Any system with an embedded computer chip needs to be looked at."
Dayton Hudson has spent about $14 million on Year-2000 compliance along with other related systems upgrades over the past two years, she said.
The retailer, which is in the midst of a project to re-engineer many of the company's core systems, realized the scope of the problem in the fall of 1996 while fixing systems for the company's Target Store division to handle additional store numbers.
"We were fixing a minor glitch in our systems for Target, but in looking at that problem the Year 2000 issue got our attention pretty quickly," said Paul Singer, vice president of systems development for DHC Information Services, Dayton Hudson's information systems arm.
Singer made a presentation concerning the Year 2000 issue at the NRF technology conference.
Singer said Target's systems have been tested for Year 2000 compliance. "We're in pretty good shape because those systems will be the basis for our other systems" in other retail divisions, he said.
During 1998, Dayton Hudson will be migrating the system used for Target to its other retail operations, including Dayton's, Hudson's, Mervyn's and Marshall Field's.
"We expect to do more testing at the end of 1998. That way, we can have a whole year to identify and fix problems," he said. "We're certainly budgeting time to get over the bumps and bruises, so our goal is to have the Year 2000 work done by Dec. 31, 1998," said Morton Mease, director of planning and technology for Montgomery Ward, Chicago, who also spoke at the conference.
Mease said Montgomery Ward has identified about 25 million lines of code that need to be examined to determine whether they are Year 2000 compliant or potentially problematic.
Even if an application is replaced, there are often interfaces to legacy systems that may not be Year 2000 compliant. "We have about 150 interface points to our legacy systems," Mease noted.
Mease also noted that many software applications purchased from vendors are often customized, another potential source of problems.
