2014 TSI: The Smooth Landing

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Mike

People have often asked me whether I was retired, and, if so, for how long. I have usually told them that I never exactly decided to retire. In 2014, however, TSI’s clients made it clear to me that it was time for me to quit.

That year was definitely a turning point in my own life. I did not rate the events and decisions of the early months of that year as a genuine crisis—unlike the four others that have been detailed in this project. During the previous several years I had seen the trends developing, I had explored every alternative that I could think of, and my financial position was good, at least in comparison with its state before the late nineties.

By late 2013 Denise Bessette, my partner, had moved from Stafford, CT, to Cape Cod. She was working from home with occasional trips to East Windsor. We could communicate by email, telephone, or through messaging on the AS/400. During this period I was 65 years old; Denise was ten years younger.

The cause: The precipitating event was a letter received in late 2013 from one of our contacts at Dick’s Sporting Goods¹, a long-time user of both AdDept and A^xN. I cannot find a copy of the letter, but it was basically an announcement that Dick’s had contracted with a media buying service to schedule and purchase its newspaper ads.

Other AdDept users had previously made similar decisions.² At RadioShack (discussed in detail here) the decision coincided with dropping the use of the AdDept system entirely. The advertising department there used it to place, manage, and pay for advertising in hundreds of papers, but it never used many of the other modules. Nevertheless, one of the employees most closely involved confided to me a few months after the outsourcing that she thought that they might have made a mistake.

A few years later Belk (described here) outsourced its newspaper buying. Unlike RadioShack, Belk by that time was using AdDept for a very large number of tasks besides scheduling and purchasing newspaper ads. Denise Podavini, the financial manager for advertising, never considered dropping AdDept. Moreover, when I explained to her that TSI would be losing a large source of revenue from Belk’s newspapers that had subscribed to A^xN³, she voluntarily authorized TSI to increase the maintenance charge to cover the difference. That reaction astounded me.

By 2013 most of TSI’s department store clients had been absorbed by Macy’s, which had then consolidated into one office in New York City. At that point that office was using neither AdDept not A^xN. Dick’s outsourcing would have little effect on the income from AdDept. It might actually have given us a custom programming assignment or two. However, it would certainly mean the loss of all the revenue from Dick’s papers that had subscribed to A^xN. There were over a hundred of them, and losing them would cost us thousands of dollars every month.

When we received the news from Dick’s my immediate evaluation was that this was the death knell for TSI. Denise was quite surprised at my reaction. We had worked together for thirty years, many of which were quite lean, and she had never seen me give up when the company faced a challenge. She spent a week or two manipulating possible projections on spreadsheets, but she finally came to the same conclusion that I had.

The plan: Denise and I met several times after working hours or out of the office in order to come up with a plan that treated our employees, Jason Dean and Ashley Elliott, our remaining clients, our vendors, and ourselves fairly. We began by making a list of things that we certainly needed to resolve:

A termination date for A^xN and support for AdDept.
A plan for the employees.
Taxes and other governmental issues.
Our lease for 7B Pasco Dr.
Letters to AdDept clients.
Notifications to vendors.
Disposition of assets.

We scheduled an appointment with our accountant, Tom Rathbun. As it happened, he was planning to retire. So, our news pretty much coincided with his plans. He provided us with a list of items that we needed to do to assure that we fulfilled our obligations to the government. We decided to terminate A^xN and software support for the AdDept product on July 31. That would provide four months to whittle down the accounts receivable and accounts payable for the final closing of the books on November 30, 2014.

The employees: Even before we met with Tom, Denise and I had decided to let the employees work until March 31 or to terminate as of January 31 and receive a four-week severance package. They both took the severance option. Denise had expected both of them to stay, but I was not too surprised when they resigned. I was amenable to either option. The severance option was actually a little better for TSI. We saved money on payroll, and it offered an immediate opportunity to sell more of the office equipment sooner.

We wrote letters of recommendation for both employees. Here is the one that Denise wrote for Jason Dean:

To Whom It May Concern,
TSI Tailored Systems, Inc., is a small company that has provided intricate and extensive software systems to businesses large and small since 1980. Jason Dean joined our staff on October 15, 2007 as a programmer analyst and quickly became an integral member of our programming and support team. In 2010 he was promoted to lead programmer analyst. Jason worked on the development of new systems and the modification of existing systems in free-form RPGLE, SQL, BASIC and CL on IBM midrange business systems. Development was focused on a comprehensive data base system for retail advertising clients. His responsibilities also included program testing and documentation, client support, and a myriad of in-house support tasks.
Jason’s performance on the job has been uniformly excellent. He is well-organized and has extremely high standards for the quality of work produced. You can depend on him to consistently deliver sophisticated applications that meet those standards, and within or well in advance of project deadlines. He quickly and easily comprehends new strategies and technologies. He is an outstanding quality control tester. His methods steadily test both the functionality and logic of the program with robust data sets. His diligence has called out a number of subtle issues during the development cycle. Jason also had the opportunity to train and impart those standards on a new programmer, the results of which were outstanding.
Jason’s ability to handle client support is impressive. He is very adept at posing the necessary questions to extract information required to resolve client issues. He consistently maintains a positive, professional and helpful attitude even when dealing with a difficult caller. He won consistent praise from our clients.
Jason’s termination had nothing to do with his job performance. Business conditions necessitated that we take steps to close the business.
I unhesitatingly and without qualification recommend Jason Dean for any similar position. I would be very happy to talk with any prospective employer about his work at TSI. I can be reached at Denise_Bessette@cox.net or 860 386-0700 (through July 31, 2014) or 508 760-2847 (home).

The letter that I wrote for Ashley was posted here.

The clients: I composed a short letter to the AdDept clients and mailed it on February 28, 2024, at which point I was the only person left in the office. Here is the text:

Denise Bessette and I have worked together for almost three decades. During this time we have taken great pride in our ability to provide first-class software and service to our clients at a reasonable price and first-class treatment of our employees and vendors. We have changed the business radically a few times to respond to various circumstances, but we have never sacrificed our basic principles.
Recent events now necessitate another change, one that we definitely regret. Two factors have made it impossible for us to continue doing business in the way that we have in the past. The first is the consolidation of the retail business. In one case thirteen of our installations collapsed into one and then, ultimately, none. The second is the trend toward outsourcing. The latter has led to the collapse of our Internet insertion-order business, on which we have come to rely. We were already running a very lean operation. There is nothing left to cut.
Therefore, we both feel that we have no choice but to shut down TSI as of July 31, 2014. We will do our best to provide the very best support of the AdDept system’s day-to-day operations through that date and even implement whatever programming changes are required on the same basis that we always have. We are definitely willing to act as consultants to help design a transitional process and to fill whatever other roles you feel are appropriate. If you wish to use AdDept beyond the above date, you are, of course, free to do so, and if you want one of us to provide some kind of support, it may be possible to make arrangements on an individual basis.
We both think that TSI has had a great run. We wish that it could continue forever because we really have enjoyed working with our clients to provide a system that provided them with what they needed to prosper.
Best wishes for the future.

As far as I know, no one asked for help designing a transition process. Some users may well have asked Denise for help. I have occasionally wondered how they coped with the situation.

Hundreds of papers received the orders for ads like these through AdDept and AxN.

After receiving the letter someone from Dick’s called us to assure us that they had not intended to drop the AdDept system. We explained that the problem was not AdDept; it was the imminent loss of revenue from the many newspapers that had subscribed to A^xN. Evidently no one at Dick’s had ever considered this ramification.

I have no information about how long any of the companies that were still using AdDept in 2014 continued to use it after July 31.

I did not write to any of the newspapers, but I did stop billing them for the subscriptions to A^xN after July 31. I was still receiving checks from a few of them through November. At that point I wrote off everything that was outstanding.

The lease: We had arranged with our landlord, Rene Dupuis (introduced here), to stay in his company’s building until July 31. Because a lot of equipment and furniture remained in the office in the middle of July, I asked Rene if we (i.e., I) could stay one more month. He said that because TSI had been an ideal tenant for such a long time, he was happy to accommodate us. Our section of the building was empty by August 31.

During the last month or two Rene brought one or two people up to TSI’s office to examine the property. I do not remember the name of the company that ended up renting it, but the lease was signed while I was still working there.The company even purchased TSI’s antiquated telephone system for $500.

Tax issues: TSI had been paying sales or use taxes to several jurisdictions. I found a copy of the Letter of Good Standing signed by a machine for Deborah Chandler, the Tax Collection Supervisor of the Compliance Support Unit. It stated that TSI owed the state of Connecticut nothing.

I also found a copy of a letter that I wrote to the state of Mississippi that stated that we had done no business there and that TSI was closing. No one replied to the letter.

I was not able to follow all of the dealings with the IRS, but in June of 2015 I definitely received two checks with income tax refunds for payments that TSI had previously made.

Tom provided me with all of the forms that I needed to file with state and federal agencies. None of them were difficult or time-consuming.

Furniture and equipment. I wore many hats in my time working at TSI. The most ill-fitting was probably the last one: used furniture salesman. I took photos of everything and placed ads on Craig’s List. To my great surprise I rapidly disposed of nearly everything. I probably should have charged more, but we had bought almost all of it second-hand many years earlier.

I found a list of the major items that I sold and their prices:

The desk in my office with one of the phone units.

Item	Price
Conference table	80
Black cabinet	50
Kitchen table, chairs	80
Three cabinets	133
Sales office desk	25
Twelve side chairs	125
Four trash cans	2
Cabinet	40
Black desk	25
Cubicles	100
Denise’s desk	25
Phone system	500
4-drawer cabinet	125

The biggest coup, aside from the sale of the telephone system, was the fact that I was able to get rid of the five-foot high⁴ dividers that were used to form cubicles. I was thrilled when a man whose wife (or maybe mother) was opening a dance studio in Windsor Locks almost directly across the Connecticut River from TSI’s office in East Windsor offered me $150 for all of the hardware. On a Saturday he drove a pickup towing a very long and flat trailer to the office. He and another fellow came upstairs, disassembled the cubicles, carried the individual sections down the stairs, and strapped them to the trailer. He thought that he got a bargain. I was afraid that I would end up needing to pay someone to take the dividers away.

The total that I received was $1,310, which I split with Denise.

I also remember giving out two very large plants to one of the guys who purchased the trash cans and some other mundane things. He took the plants that Eileen Sheehan-Willett had nursed from near-fatal neglect to monstrosities and put them in his truck. He was thoughtful enough to wait until he was out of sight to throw out the plants and save the pots.

I found the following notes in an Excel spreadsheet called equipment.xls:

The 515 server was sold to Saks Inc. for $2500 on 7/31/14.
The 270 server, color printer, Dell PC, scanner, and backup hub were taken by Mike on 7/31/14. The 270 will be scrapped when the company is closed. It has no market value.
The black & white laser printer was taken by Denise on 7/31/14.
Fax machine and copier were donated to a local church on 7/31/14.
Two dot matrix printers with no market value were donated to the New England Bridge Conference on 8/31/14.
All other equipment was scrapped on or about 7/31/14.

The 270 and 515 were iSeries (i.e., AS/400) models. The 270 and the other equipment were transported to our house at the end of August (not July) in a truck that my wife Sue borrowed from her friend and bridge partner, Jan Bailey.⁵ The equipment resided in my office for a few months until TSI’s books were closed, and I was pretty sure that I would not need the server. It, the backup hub, a twinax display, and a snake’s nest of cables have rested peacefully in the basement and are still there in 2024. The color printer, which supported two-sided printing, the scanner, and the PC lasted for quite a few years before they were scrapped or recycled somewhere.

A few other things made their way to our house. The kitchen at 7B had a microwave and a small refrigerator. The former is still in use in 2024, but the circular plat no longer spun around. It was due for the junk heat. The latter was given to David Basch, the grandson of another of Sue’s bridge partners, in exchange for doing the heavy lifting in the move. A small shelf and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase were moved to my office at the house in Enfield. A good many smaller items also made the journey back to Enfield.

The largest item that I neither sold nor brought back to Enfield was the Uninterruptible Power Supplu (UPS). The UPS was a large battery with outlets for several power cables. Our AS/400 and a few other devices were attached to it. The UPS could provide enough electricity to last for a few hours.

Power failures were not unknown in Connecticut. Denise and I discussed purchasing a generator, but we could never justify the expense. We only experienced a couple of power failures in the nearly fourteen years that TSI’s headquarters was in East Windsor, and the UPS was sufficient to to get us through them.

The UPS was very heavy. I carried it out to my car and transported it to a nearby dumpster. It was all that I could do to lift it to shoulder height and drop it in.

The one-man show: From February through August I drove into East Windsor every morning. Every evening I drove back to Enfield. When I arrived at work I checked to make sure that all the equipment was working. I encountered absolutely no hardware problems. Once a month I sent out invoices for software support and for A^xN subscriptions. I usually ate lunch in the office by myself.

The highlight of the day was when the mail came. If there were any checks, I processed them in our home-grown accounts receivable system and then deposited them in the bank. I was often amazed that newspapers that I was fairly certain were no longer using A^xN continued to pay for the service. I attributed this to the fact that so many newspapers had outsourced their processing of accounts payable to an outside service. TSI’s bills seemed to slip through the cracks of the approval process.

I spent most of the rest of my days sitting at the PC. I already had a pretty good command of HTML, JavaScript, php and MySQL. I did a lot of work on the NEBridge.org website, and it was also during this period that I got the idea of maintaining a database of ACBL members who resided in District 25 (New England). Allan Clamage (introduced here), who served as the editor of the website, told me how to download roster files from the ACBL and set it up so that I had the authority to do so. The details of the database are described here.

The other major project that I worked on was my historical novel about Pope Benedict IX. The story of its genesis and why it was posted on Wavada.org but was never at Barnes & Noble is described in some detail here.

In some ways I wished that I had been a history major and gotten a PhD. Then I probably would have found someone with whom I could discuss my ideas about eleventh-century papal politics. On the other hand, I should remember that I only became interested in the popes in the twenty-first century, and I finished grad school in the seventies. Moreover, my interest in the eleventh century was a byproduct of a rather random introduction to a somewhat obscure ninth-century pope named Formosus.

I did not take a vacation in 2014, but I did go to quite a few bridge tournaments. This was the period during which I implemented a system of posting photographs of winners of regional events on NEBridge.org webpages. I called those pages “Winners Boards” because the background that I used looked like boards. I kept that feature up through 2021.

At about the same time I also began sending emails promoting the regional tournaments in New England. At first I composed the emails myself and sent them through my Wavada.org account. When I got blacklisted as a spammer, Bob Bertoni came to my rescue. That harrowing situation was described here.

The regional tournaments in 2014 were the first to include meetings of a committee that was known as “The B’s Needs”. It was initially chaired by Ausra Geaski, the president of the district. I attended every meeting.

The initial purpose of the committee was to recommend ways to make the tournaments more enjoyable for Flight B players, those with too many points to play in the “Gold Rush” events that were limited to less than 750 masterpoints. These people found themselves up against people with many thousands of points and years of experience. It was not generally a pleasant experience.

Over the next few years the committee produced a large number of suggestions for making the tournaments more attractive to B players and to everyone else. Many of them were implemented, and there is very little doubt that they had, for the most part, a profoundly positive effect on the tournaments. I took great pride in what we did as a group and what I personally implemented. This activity provided a purpose to my life at a time when I really needed one. It made me feel that I was using my time and skills to make life more enjoyable for people who shared one of my principal interests. Most of my contributions were cast aside in the post-Pandemic environment, and it saddened me greatly.

I found some materials about this committee. I have posted Ausra’s minutes of the meetings in Newton, MA, in January (here), Cromwell, CT, in February (here), and Nashua, NH, in September (here). I have also posted here the notes that Allan wrote up about the group’s first few ideas.

The version with a possible career in mining was the best.

While I was occupied with closing down TSI Sue had knee-replacement surgery on both legs. Afterwards she spent several days getting rehabilitated at Suffield House. I went to see her every evening. On one evening my friend Tom Corcoran joined us, and we played a game of Careers. Sue had to remind me of this event while I was in the process of writing this entry.

September.through December: For the last three months I ran what was left of TSI from my office at the house. I still received payments from newspapers almost right up to when I closed the books for good at the end of November.

I still had some communications with Tom Rathbun in December of 2014, but after that TSI has been nothing but a source of incredible memories. The process of closing it down was somewhat complicated, but I don’t remember making any serious mistakes.

1. Details of the installations at Dick’s Sporting Goods have been posted here.

2. I am not sure why these companies made the decisions. It is possible that the media buying services claimed that the fact that they represented several large advertisers would give them more clout in negotiating with newspapers. They may also have been able to claim more expertise in choosing between papers in the few markets that had more than one.

3. In theory it would have been possible for TSI to construct an interface that could be used by media buying services. We had written many interfaces to both send and receive records in other modules. However, the information that A^xN required from AdDept contained four different types of records: headers for ads, special instructions at the header level, individual ads, and special instructions for individual ads. Could we persuade the buying service to send records in that format? I considered it unlikely in the extreme even if we did not charge them for using the service. Even if they were persuaded, we would have had to devise foolproof ways of dealing with errors in their files. Moreover, the process of fixing errors would need to be very efficient. Time could be of the essence. It appeared to me to be a nightmarish situation.

4. I am pretty sure about the height because I remember being just barely able to kick my right foot up and rest my ankle on the top of one to stretch my quads before running.

5. Jan Bailey, Ginny Basch, and Sue were regular participants in an unsanctioned bridge game that was held on Thursday evenings in Somers.

2004-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Dick’s

Posted on December 12, 2022 by Mike

Chain of sporting goods stores in Pittsburgh. Continue reading →

Dick’s Sporting Goods is as old as I am. It started as small store in Binghamton, NY, that sold fishing equipment. In 1994 it was moved to the Pittsburgh area. In 2022 it had over 850 stores with over 50,000 employees.

TSI and Dick’s had a very long courtship. I am sure that I made several trips to Dick’s before we signed the contract. The first time that I visited the company it was still in its previous building, which was much smaller than the complex that it constructed in Coraopolis, PA.

We never gave up on selling them a system even though many of AdDept’s features would never be of much use to them. I knew that Dick’s IT department was committed to the AS/400 architecture. Therefore, the cost to them would not include the cost of additional hardware, which was often a deal-breaker.

I remember one sales trip in which I was asked to talk about the way that our system handled co-op—ads that feature a single vendor who has agreed to pay a portion of the expenses. I was pretty sure that no one would buy the AdDept system just to handle co-op, but I always tried to do what they asked. I have read through pages and pages of notes about the project of installing AdDept at Dick’s, but I found no subsequent mention of co-op

TSI and Dick’s formally tied the knot in a contract dated March 4, 2003. It was signed by Eileen Gabriel¹, who was Dick’s CIO at the time and me. I still have a pdf file of the document. Most of our contracts were far simpler than this one. Their lawyers obviously added quite a bit of language to the one that we submitted. Neither side ever had any difficulty about it during the more than eleven years that it was in force.

At the time that we negotiated the contract I did not understand (or, for that matter have much interest in) why Dick’s, which up until 2003 had always been in the “kicking the tires” column of prospective AdDept users, suddenly was rarin’ to go. I subsequently discovered two factors that probably contributed to the change in attitude: 1) The company went public in 2002. That probably provided a good deal of cash. 2) By then the advertising department had hired several employees who were familiar with what TSI and AdDept could accomplish². There probably were other favorable conditions that were not evident to me.

Planning for the AdDept system: Dick’s already had several large AS/400’s that were used for other aspects of its business. On one of them were PeopleSoft³ applications designed for the accounting and human resources departments. One of TSI’s major challenges would be to implement an interface between AdDept and PeopleSoft’s A/P and G/L systems. When employees in the advertising department entered expense invoices into the AdDept system they would automatically be sent to the PeopleSoft system for payment and posting to the General Ledger.

I found a document created by Paul Marshalek⁴, the first project manager for the AdDept installation. It provided the agenda for a one-day “discovery session” that was held in the Final Four room on April 16, 2004, almost exactly one year after the contract was signed. The scheduled attendees were Krista Fullen⁵ and Adam Sembrat⁶ from advertising, Don Steward⁷ from IT, Joe Oliver⁸ and Jeff Jones⁹ from finance, Paul, and myself.

The agenda includes a dozen items. During my preparation for this entry one caught my attention. I remember spending a lot of time at Dick’s on various aspects of print media from insertion orders (sent via A^xN¹⁰ from the beginning) to payment of bills to allocation of costs to stores. I did not remember much about broadcast. At the time they used an advertising agency called Empower MediaMarketing¹¹ based in Cincinnati. I could not find any evidence that we ever implemented an interface by which the buys from the agency were uploaded to AdDept. TSI provided this for most AdDept users, but it usually required custom programming or at least some fine-tuning.

Getting the AdDept system operational: It was made very clear to me that TSI’s client was the IT department, and the people in advertising and accounting were the IT department’s clients. So, the IT department made all the calls in this installation. In some ways this made things more difficult for me. I was never sure whether the advertising department was satisfied with our progress. On the other hand, we heard very few complaints, probably because everything that the advertising department really wanted was installed in phase 1, as described below.

Dick’s insisted on having two separate AdDept environments, one for testing of new code and one for production. Both of them were named after Greek gods of wind. Aeolus, the developmental system, was named after the keeper of the winds. Boreas, the production system was named after the personification of the north wind. TSI employees had no credentials for signing on to Boreas and no way to reach it from our office in East Windsor.

Aeolus and Boreas actually resided on the same AS/400, but they were in different partitions designed to make accidental intermixing of the two environments impossible. If separate boxes had been purchased, separate licensing agreements would be required for the operating system and IBM system-level programs. This would have made the installation of upgrades a much more difficult and time-consuming process for the IT department.

This installation involved a large number of interfaces and a great deal of custom programming. When we delivered a new batch of program changes—both routine updates and code specifically for Dick’s—we had to install the new code in Aeolus, implement the required changes to the database, and test them there. Advertising employees would then be required to sign on to Aeolus and make sure that both the new and previously installed AdDept programs worked. If the changes were not ones that they requested, it was difficult to get them to take this seriously.

During the testing and approval period a process that “refreshed” the AdDept system in Aeolus with the programs and data from Boreas needed to be suspended. If the timing of the suspension was not perfect, then all of the changes that we had installed during that period could be wiped out. A few times this happened to us, and it was quite upsetting.

When all of the advertising department asserted that the changes were good to go, the Aeolus system was refreshed, and TSI needed to install the changes again. The people in advertising would spot check what we had done. During this second period the AdDept system on Boreas was frozen. When the advertising people validated the changes, the Boreas system was refreshed with the new code and the transformed data on Aeolus. Only at that point could work resume. The primary purpose of all this was, I suspect, to eliminate the possibility that IT people might be blamed for deleterious outcomes.

This approach was much less efficient than our usual method of delivering code. I routinely installed new code to four or five other AdDept installations every weekend. Most of the time the users did not even know that I had done anything. There were occasional problems, but never anything that we could not address in an hour or so.

I don’t blame Dick’s for insisting that we follow their protocols, but we had had great success at over thirty installations with the approach that we had developed, and we would never have been able accomplish so much if we had been tied to Dick’s approach in all of them.

Inevitably, despite all of the precautions, some bugs slipped through the testing process—both TSI’s and the advertising department’s. Dick’s had a method that allowed us to make emergency changes to address them, but I don’t remember the details of how it worked. We only needed it once or twice.

If there was a problem or a request for new code, the users had to go through the IT department. The people who served as TSI’s primary point of contact—the liaisons—were people who worked in the IT department as project managers.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the enforced separation of the users from the developers was that Dick’s insisted that I do all the training after the initial installation in one of their training rooms. I did not like this at all. Often the people who showed up at these training classes were not the people who would be using the programs that we were installing. Sometimes I did not know what roles were played by some of the people. I did the best that I could under the circumstances.

At other installations—even the ones with AS/400s owned and operated by the IT department—I was allowed direct access to the users. I had a thorough understanding of the administration of retail advertising, a claim that could be made by none of our liaisons. Many times I could address their issues on the spot and direct them to programs or techniques that they were previously unfamiliar with.

I am certain that the installation would have proceeded more rapidly and with fewer problems if the IT people had allowed us to use our time-tested methods, but the idea was absolutely anathema to them. The IT department owned the AS/400’s, and they insisted upon their right of ownership. Bypassing this interference from the IT department was the primary reason that we always preferred for the advertising departments to have their own smaller systems that could eventually communicate with the systems running the other aspects of the business.

Our main contact at Dick’s during the installation and for some time afterwards was John Nelko¹², an IT employee whose specialty was the workings of the AS/400’s operating system, OS/400. Under his supervision I installed AdDept on Aeolus and built all the files that they would need to use. I also installed IBM’s BASIC compiler and interpreter. That product was no longer supported by IBM, but TSI was authorized to sell and install it. Most of the other IBM software—SQL, query, FTP, faxing, etc.—that would be needed was already on the box.

On that very first day John and I got the faxing to work. I also was able to send an insertion order through A^xN to TSI’s server. That required that FTP over the Internet was working. It also required that Dick’s be set up on TSI’s system as a valid sender.

TSI was assigned a user ID on Aeolus called TSIDICKS. I was told that the password was set to expire every sixty days. John worked with Denise Bessette in our office to get the SDLC communication working over the telephone lines. In the beginning that was how we accessed the system from TSI’s office.

There was a little time left over in that first visit for extensive training. My notes reported:

We got through the season table, expense classes, ad types, markets, pubs, rates, and print rates in the first training session. Everyone seemed comfortable with everything. In the second training class we went through the more difficult tables pretty thoroughly and entered a couple of ads.
The pub-store master table for inserts was not set up correctly by the program which¹³ I wrote to create the table. I fixed it. I used the Saks programs as the basis for DM220RDX and DM230RDX. Adam wants to show the costs on insertion orders. Most of the programs do not do this. I added a column for the Skid Color to the insertion order. I did this all during a long meeting which everyone in advertising attended on Wednesday afternoon.

I remember that the names of the insertion order programs for ROP and inserts began with DM220 and DM230 respectively. The “Skid Color” refers to the color of the tag that was attached to a “skid” (a pallet with no bottom deckboards) on which the inserts were stacked and packaged for delivery. Each version of an insert was assigned a different color.

These were my last few comments on that momentous trip:

Amanda Sembrat, then known as Amanda Greener.

We had a good luncheon meeting about the rest of the project. Steve Manning, the Budgeting Director, attended. They are considering whether to use AdDept to create real purchase orders for all advertising expenses.
I almost made the mistake of going to a Mexican restaurant on Cinco di Mayo.
I showed Krista how to respond to errors. At this point both Adam and Amanda were involved in other things.
I think that Adam overstepped his authority last time when he decreed that we did not need the broadcast interface. Helen said that we may need to revisit this. We had better be careful with Adam. He sounds like he has more authority than he really does.
Request #1 was approved.
They certainly want me to return for the first insertion order run. They may want me sooner than that.

The fact that Dick’s ran so many inserts in so many markets caused some unique challenges that were also mentioned in the notes:

Adam says that about 15 papers have separate rates for flexis, which are also called minis. We need to come up with some way of handling this.
Most of their events start on Sunday. If the paper does not publish on Sunday, they want it to default to Saturday, Monday, Friday (before), Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (after) in that order. I set things up to work this way, I think, but I was not able to test every possibility. For Thursday drops, they want it to default to Wednesday, Friday, Saturday.
They want to use the holiday quantities for Thanksgiving. Is there a good way to do this?
They have some “events” which involve sponsorships with sports teams. The costs are spread over several months. I am thinking that we might use Stage’s amortizing programs for this.

The second trip June 14, 2004: Dick’s was one of the few clients for which a one-day trip was at least somewhat reasonable. USAir had many direct flights between Bradley and Pittsburgh. Because Dick’s was so close to the airport, I could easily get to the office at the same time as the employees.

I did encounter one major problem: I discovered that it was not trivially easy to meet with people in the advertising department.

I got there about 9 a.m., but I had to wait about 30 minutes as they tried to figure out what to do with me. Advertising is in the new building, but the reception desk is in the old building. Eventually they managed to contact Adam, and he showed me into the building.

Here is what happened once I got to the advertising area:

I spent most of the morning making sure that all papers were correctly designated as F for faxing or T for AxN. I called Lucia¹⁵ to make sure that we were in agreement concerning every paper.
I met with Adam, Helen, Paul, and Steve about where we stand and what is on the agenda. Steve said that they need to keep track of actuals versus budgets. It took me a while to figure out that he means by category on each book. Right before he left he gave me a list of the categories which they currently use. They also decided that advertising should meet with Jane Walker and the accounting people to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
I helped Adam set up a pub group for all of his insert papers. He also needs one of his main papers. I think that he now knows how to do this.
We put on an ad and printed insertion orders. Adam noticed that only the first 12 characters of the fax number appeared. I fixed this.
The sequence number for the NJS market was incorrect. Adam fixed it.
We discovered that there were no rates for 6-page tabs. They sometimes run 12-page minis (same as flexis) which ordinarily use these rates. I wrote a little program to help Adam key these rates in fast.
I was able to establish an FTP session on TSI270.
Amanda¹⁶, who is engaged to Adam, said that she had looked over the quote for the run list. It looked good to her. They would like to have it by 6/28, although, of course, they have not approved it yet.

They were unable to print. The printer which they formerly used is no longer near them. I called John Nelko. He eventually identified the printer. I need to send him a memo telling him which user profiles need to be changed to use the new printer, which is called Ad_Dept.
I think that DM022 should use the text description from the book size file rather than the dimensions for the size on screen #M22A.
We could not fax because the modem was not available. I will send an e-mail to John to try to reserve the modem one day this week. Adam wanted to wait until Friday, but I told him that I would be out of town on Friday.

The rest of the story: An AdDept Progress Report dated October 15, 2004, and prepared by (I think) Paul Marshalek identified phase 1 of the installation as “print media”, which for Dick’s was primarily in the form of newspaper inserts. Phase 2 was much more detailed. It had the following sections:

Pub-store allocations, which included implementation of an interface with the system that Dick’s used for sales analysis.
Other media: broadcast, magazines, and billboards (which everyone in advertising called “outdoor” even if the signs were in a building).
Another interface to “refresh” AdDept’s vendor table so that its data was consistent with PeopleSoft’s.
Expense invoices, which in AdDept were divided into media (which were entered against the schedule) and non-media (which were entered by job categories or sub-accounts). This project included the expense payables interface.
Media accruals that created the journal entry for the G/L in PeopleSoft. The document notes that the file containing the journal entry for August 2004 was delivered to Jane Walker¹⁴ in the IT department.
Cost accounting, which in their case meant advertising costs (including overhead) in all media per store.
Non-media closing, which included accruals from purchase orders and prepaids.

This list, which resulted from the four-day trip that I made in October of 2004, included some really big programming jobs, but I am pretty sure that they were all eventually implemented.

I met several new people on that trip:

Carol Mazza was a media manager who worked for Helen Burkholder. Krista and Erika Crawford worked for her.
Linda Weiss was tasked with entering broadcast invoices. She reported to Steve Manning.
Dave Derry was an internal auditor.
Todd Schultz worked in Expense Payables.
Jeff March, who worked at Galyans, a company that Dick’s had recently acquired, was scheduled to start work the next Monday as broadcast manager.
Rick Kohout provided me with files that I used to implement the sales interface.¹⁷

Most of my time on the October 2004 visit was spent with Krista. I checked over what she had done for ROP and inserts and helped her set up other types of ads. At the time Dick’s was rapidly expanding. New stores were provided with pre-opening and grand opening advertising support. These ads had their own separate G/L accounts, and we had to devise a way of handling them.

My next trip was in April of 2005. I gave a talk to eleven people to explain how AdDept does accounting. The tone of my notes indicates my frustration. Accounting for advertising is complicated. I could not explain it very well in a few minutes in a classroom setting.

I learned that Jeff Jones accrued to plan. Here is what I reported about the reconciliation process:

Jeff explained that he made his “accrual entry.” He actually closes to plan. He takes the planned expenses, subtracts out the invoices paid, and spreads the difference to markets in a spreadsheet.
We got the February accrual to match. This is not really much of an accomplishment. We just matched one AdDept report to another after eliminating all possible sources of error. We got the March accrual to match within .5%. We ran the report by ad so that Jeff could compare it with the list which he used for his accrual.

Accrual to plan is a bogus concept. The whole idea of accruing is to make the expenses and income occur in the appropriate month so that one can isolate problem areas as soon as they develop. Accruing to plan disguises difficulties because the actuals are forced to match budgets. However, it was not my job to explain this.

I came up with a list of eleven things that needed to be changed in the production system. At other installations I would have just fixed them myself, but I was not allowed to touch anything. Denise and I had to come up with ways to circumvent this restriction in each case.

I also listed six or seven small changes that they requested.

I returned to Dick’s on May 31 for one day to look at their pub-store allocation records. I discovered that because someone skipped the step of creating these records, the allocations of costs to stores for 2005 have all been wrong.

I also helped them address the issue of paying bills for ads that ran in 2004. I came up with a Mickey Mouse method that at least got the accounting right at the G/L level.

The notes from my only visit in 2006 are very sketchy. There were a couple of new people whom I do not remember, and someone in advertising asked us to quote a massive database of zip codes to help with ordering insert distributions. Some—but by no means all—newspapers allow specifications of zip codes for insert distribution. Both AdDept and A^xN handled this by special instructions.

I remember quoting creating this database, but I don’t think that we ever did it. The notes make no mention of any other media or any accounting issues.

I made one four-day visit in 2007. I met a lot of new people. Included in that group were Carl Abel and Bob Pecina,¹⁸ who would be our primary contact for the rest of our relationship.

Among other things I learned that the advertising department had begun using AdDept for billboards and magazines.

They expressed considerable interest in copying all ads from one year to another for planning purposes. This was an important but very complicated task for any retailer. TSI had software to do this. If everything was set up perfectly, or at least nearly so, it could save a lot of time and make for more accurate planning. If anything important about the process was ignored, it could make a gigantic mess.

I knew that it would be a nightmare at Dick’s for more reasons than I could name. I am pretty sure that nothing ever came of this.

I learned that their change reports were essentially useless because they included ads that were created in order to estimate costs under a specific scenario and then deleted. There were a lot of these ads. I think that we put in a Y/N field on the selection screens for change reports to allow them to be excluded.

The last major project that we did for Dicks was to create a separate installation for Golf Galaxy, a retail chain that Dick’s had acquired in 2006. The administrative functions were not moved to Coraopolis until 2008. I decided to create a separate blog entry for the Golf Galaxy project. It can be viewed here.

Mike Krall.

When reading my notes for the two trips that I took in 2008 I discovered that I also spent time with Mike Krall¹⁹, a young guy who had been assigned the daunting task of managing the “cost accounting” programs that showed in summary and in detail how expenses were attributable to stores using rules that Dick’s created. The reports depended upon all aspects of the data—media and production costs, sales, store allocations, etc.—being accurate.

Here are some of the notes from the time that I spent with him:

I spent most of the day on Wednesday with Mike Krall. He runs the month end programs in AdDept, but he did not really know what he was doing. He had a detailed set of instructions to follow.
I made some queries in ADVMOQRY for Mike Krall to provide him with net indirect expense (INDNETEXP) and net production expenses for ads in prior months (PRIORMOEXP). I explained that these would only get the data from Dicks. If he wants Golf Galaxy, he should make copies and change the libraries from TSIDATA to TSIDATAG.
Does DX112 expense the indirects? Mike Krall said that he does not create a journal entry for indirects.

The white areas are buildings. The main entrance was in the middle of the top set. The bottom building and most of the parking (grey) areas did not exist when I visited last.

The atmosphere at Dick’s headquarters: Working at Dick’s was unlike anything that I experienced at any other retailer. For the most part the administrative departments of the department store chains that dominated the list of AdDept clients were located on the highest floors of large downtown stores. The ambience in the lower floors was designed to generate excitement. The upper floors were at best boring and sometimes even dingy. Even the offices of retailers that housed their administrative functions elsewhere were mundane.

The gigantic lobby at Dick’s headquarters.

Arrival at Dick’s was not an overwhelmingly pleasant experience. Despite the massive size of the complex—and it is much larger in 2022 than it was in my last visit of 2008—the offices in Coraopolis were not trivially easy to find within the industrial park. The parking was not a bit convenient. In those days there was only one lot, and by the time that I arrived with my rental car only spots that were a long way from the main entrance were available.

I don’t think that I was ever in this room.

From the front door one entered a huge waiting area. No one without an employee badge could get past it without being escorted. My memory may be faulty, but I don’t recall that they ever gave me a temporary badge.

Incidentally, it would not have been a good idea to arrive early to try to claim a better parking space. I would not have been allowed past the lobby until the person or people with whom I was meeting were there.

Surrounding the lobby were eight or ten conference rooms. Each was named after famous sporting events—Super Bowl, the Masters, World Series, etc. They were extremely elegant. A few of our early meetings were held in one of them.

Dick’s also had a very nice cafeteria, which was called the Court Street Café. I am pretty sure that I ate there every day—except the time that lunch was delivered to our meeting—on every visit. It’s a good thing, too. There were no restaurant in or near the industrial park in which the headquarters resided.

I remember feeling quite short on one of my first visits there. I was at least six feet tall, but almost everyone I met was quite a bit taller. Later I heard about a volleyball tournament held somewhere inside the facility during the lunch break or maybe right after work. They already had an indoor basketball court when I visited. Now they have that (with a track around it), tennis courts, and a huge workout room.

Epilogue: Alone among TSI’s clients, Dick’s still seemed to be thriving in 2022. They even have a store in Enfield next to Costco. A very large percentage of the people with whom I worked in the early twenty-first centuries are still employed there in Coraopolis.

A decision made by Dick’s in late 2013 was the cause of the decision to close down TSI. At the time the income from maintenance fees was not enough to keep the company running. The income from custom programming had also dwindled, and there were no real prospects for sales of new AdDept systems.

We therefore depended on the steady stream of checks from the newspapers that subscribed to the A^xN service. Because several of our other largest A^xN users had outsourced the buying of their newspaper space to third parties, Dick’s many newspapers accounted for a large percentage of the remaining income. I knew immediately that the decision by Dick’s management to let an advertising agency order its newspaper space was the death knell for TSI. The details are described here.

The people at Dick’s were quite surprised by TSI’s decision. Someone called us and told us that they still wanted to use AdDept. They evidently thought that we had misinterpreted their communication about the agency. We had to explain that the A^xN contracts generated a considerable amount of income for us.

Denise Bessette may have made a private arrangement to provide some support for the AdDept system at Dick’s. I was 65 years old when we made the decision to close, and I was not interested in such a venture.

1. I am not sure that I ever met Eileen. If I did, I don’t remember the occasion. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. Two people who may have played significant roles behind the scene were Helen Burkholder, an executive in Dick’s advertising department, and Bill Dandy, her boss. I did not spend a lot of time with either of them in this installation, but they were both certainly influential.

I had worked closely with Helen when she was a media manager at Kaufmann’s. The blog entry about the Kaufmann’s installation is posted here. I am not sure what Bill Dandy’s title was. I met him when he took over that job at Michael’s in Irving, TX. That very profitable installation has been chronicled here. Helen’s LinkedIn page is here. Bill’s can be viewed here.

3. In December 2014 PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle. I am not sure what effect this had on Dick’s. It did not seem to affect the design of the interface.

4. Paul worked in the IT department, not advertising. His LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

5. Krista Gianantonio (née Fullen) was our day-to-day contact in advertising. Her LinkedIn page is here. She was familiar with AdDept and TSI from her previous jobs at Hecht’s (described here) and Kaufmann’s (described here).

6. Adam Sembrat’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

7. I don’t remember Don Steward at all. I don’t think that we had any subsequent dealings with him. He might have been Paul’s boss. His LinkedIn page is here.

8. I don’t remember Joe Oliver. His LinkedIn page is here.

9. Jeff Jones actually worked with the financial side of AdDept. His LinkedIn page is here.

10. Dick’s had stores all over the country, and they advertised in hundreds of newspapers. The fact that the advertising department was excited about electronic delivery of insertion orders gave a big boost to TSI’s efforts to expand the use of the A^xN product.

11. In 2022 the company is just called Empower. Its Wikipedia page can be found here.

12. John Nelko’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

13. When researching the notes I definitely realized that I had not yet learned when to use “that” and when to use “which”. This “which” should be a “that”. So should the “which” in the last sentence.

14. Like many of the other people listed in this entry Jane Walker is still employed at Dick’s in 2022. Her LinkedIn page is here.

15. Lucia Hagan was the administrative person at TSI during this period. Her history at TSI is described here.

16. My notes say that Amanda Greener was not actually employed by Dick’s; she actually worked for Dick’s printer. She evidently married Adam. Her LinkedIn page is here.

17. I have only the vaguest recollections of any of these people, but I found LinkedIn pages for several of them: Carol Mazza’s is here. Todd Schultz’s is here. Jeff March’s is here. Rick Kohout’s is here.

18. Bob Pecina’s LinkedIn page is here.

19. Mike Krall left Dick’s in 2011. His LinkedIn page is here.

1995-2009 TSI: AdDept Client: Macy’s West

Posted on September 27, 2022 by Mike

Department store chain based in San Francisco. Continue reading →

I have been putting off the writing of this page for the last few months. Macy’s West was a big and important client, but my memories of most of the people and the projects that we did for them are hazy. To make matters worse, I have found very few notes about the installation and no photos whatsoever.

Macy’s was acquired by Federated in 1994 shortly after both companies emerged from bankruptcy. TSI had been pitching Macy’s West, the division that was administered in San Francisco, about purchasing an installation of the AdDept system for some time.

I am pretty sure that the original inquiry from Macy’s West came from Gary Beberman, who had been our liaison for the very first AdDept systems at Macy’s East in New York City (described here) and who had also consulted on the installation at Neiman Marcus (described here). He and his wife, who also worked at Macy’s, had moved to the Bay Area, and Gary had taken a job at Macy’s West. The advertising department was looking for a system, and Gary recommended that AdDept be considered. He told them what we had accomplished in Manhattan and probably also mentioned things that could have been done but weren’t.

I vaguely remember doing a demo in San Francisco, and I think that Doug Pease might have come with me. I have a vague recollection that someone from the I. Magnin stores, by then managed by Macy’s West, was in attendance. It may very well be that the Macy’s West advertising department was able to use an AS/400 that had formerly been used (probably for accounting) by I. Magnin.

In the first few years most of our dealings were with Gary. I did quite a bit of consulting on my trips to San Francisco, but he did most of the training of the users in San Francisco. Since they used hardware they already owned, we were not involved in quite a few aspects of the installation that we often were.

That arrangement was positive in that it allowed me and the rest of the people at TSI to spend more time on more productive activities. The down side, however, was that none of us at TSI had a good feel for how well the installation was going. Macy’s West seldom called for support and used AdDept for fifteen years. Our association stopped only when the corporate bigwigs brought all of the administrative functions to the Big Apple.

My visits to Macy’s: I made a half dozen or so trips to Macy’s West over the years. I flew to San Francisco on whatever airline had the best rates at the time. It might have been United, Delta, or American. The flight back was always on a red-eye.

The advertising department at Macy’s was located in a building that was a few blocks from the huge store in Union Square. It might have been on Fremont St. I stayed at a Holiday Inn that was on either Mission St. or Market St. I don’t think that the hotel is still there. It may have been sold to another chain.

I did not rent a car; I took BART from and to the airport, and I walked from the hotel to Macy’s headquarters. I may have taken a taxi once or twice. I only remember one meal that I ate in San Francisco. Gary Beberman and I walked to one of his favorite restaurants that was, I think, in Chinatown. I remember no further details. My meals on other occasions were probably grabbed in passing from fast food places.

I am pretty sure that on one occasion I took the cable car from the turnaround on Powell Street up to the top of the hill. I did not visit the Cable Car Museum. It was in my price range. So, either I did not know about it, or I might have been pressed for time.

The people: I only have notes and memories of two people whom I worked with in the first twelve or thirteen years. Emily White was the Senior VP of the advertising department from May 1996 to October 1998. Doug knew her from their time together at G. Fox in Hartford. I later worked more closely with her at Meier & Frank in Portland.

Around the turn of the century there was a major upheaval in the department. This is what I wrote in 2000:

They have recently undergone wholesale personnel changes. We have done a lot of work for them designing interfaces. We have designed very few reports. They must use a number of queries to create reports. The original training was done by Gary Beberman, who lives in San Francisco, and was our first liaison at Macy’s East.
I do not have a good feel for what they are doing at Macy’s West. I imagine that they could benefit a great deal from a few days of our time.

Dan Stackhouse was our liaison in later years. He was in charge of the local network used in the department. He did not really know much about either the AS/400 or the AdDept system, but he was able to gather specs for new projects for us and address connectivity issues.

I remember that Dan was fired by Macy’s, and he sued them over this action. He asked me to submit an affidavit explaining our relationship. I did what he asked, but I doubt that it helped his cause much. I searched the Internet for references to his lawsuit. I did not find much.

A^xN: Because of Gary’s close involvement with the project, almost all of the work that we did for Macy’s West was in the establishment of interfaces with their corporate accounting systems. We customized very few reports for them.

One very unusual project was the coding and installation a menu that could be used by people in the merchandise departments to look at information about their ads. They set up user IDs for each department or group that were restricted to the programs and queries available from this menu.

The only other project that I remember in much detail was involved with A^xN, TSI’s system for sending and managing insertion orders for newspaper advertising space. Unlike Macy’s East¹, the people in San Francisco were very enthusiastic about delivering insertion orders via the Internet.

TSI’s initial contact with the newspapers that would hopefully be subscribing to the service was a letter written by me and signed by someone at the advertising department. I remember vividly that the woman whom we asked to sign it had no additions or changes to the letter, and she definitely wanted us to send it. However, she did not want to take the time to sign the letters herself. She said, “You can just sign them.” So, for the first and only time in my career I added the role of forger to the long list of activities that I did for the company.

The A^xN installation at Macy’s West provided TSI with a few far-flung clients. Macy’s purchased Liberty House, the chain of department stores and resort-wear stores based in Hawaii, in 2001. One of those stores was in Guam, and the Pacific Daily News subscribed for several years.

The last trip: My last trip to Macy’s West was for two days at the end of July 2007. I learned that Sheila Field was the Senior VP of marketing. She had in fact been there for several years and before that at Foley’s in Houston, where I spent a lot of time in the mid-nineties. I never had met her, and she was also not available on this occasion. I did meet with many other people. I did not do a great job of learning names. Here is the unedited list from my notes:

Sheila Field² is the Senior VP. She is from Foley’s. I almost certainly know her, but I did not get to see her on this trip. Kedar Stanbury³ is in finance, which means planning at Macy’s West. So is Von Jones⁴. Their boss is Chuck Allen⁵. The business office manager is Gary Veran⁶. His assistant is Diane _______. Laurie Hamilton⁷ is the print media director. Jennifer Hung⁸, Kelly ____, and Terry _____ work for Laurie.

They reported quite a few anomalies that they had been living with. I made it clear that they should report these to TSI. We always fixed things promptly. They gave me a list of areas that they were interested in using AdDept for:

Contracts.
Work group limitations for purchase orders. Does this even work? They want to make sure that the direct mail people create nothing but direct mail purchase orders. Do we have a way to do this?
Components.
Foley’s effectiveness (advertising productivity) reports.
Expense invoice upload.
Co-op upload.
Month end:
1. Media accruals.
2. Non-media accruals.
3. Prepaid to expense.
4. Prepaid reconciliation.
Run lists.
Stage’s Internet ads.

The plan was for me to return in “a few weeks”. I cannot overstate how psyched they were for using AdDept more productively. My notes stated that I thought that they would approve whatever programming was needed for every item on the list.

Alas, the plan never was carried out. In February of 2009 management of all advertising for all Macy’s divisions was consolidated in New York. Within a few years none of the people mentioned above were still working for Macy’s. I don’t think that any of them made the transition to New York.

This consolidation was a major blow to TSI. I knew that there was little or no chance of persuading the consolidated Macy’s to use AdDept. Macy’s West was a big client for both AdDept and A^xN.

1. For some reason Macy’s East never used AdDept for insertion orders. They did not even use it to print copies. Instead they called each paper and described each ad that they wanted to run to the newspaper’s rep. It baffled me that they could not appreciate how much faster and easier it would be to use AdDept, which had all of the information on the order, to send orders to all papers at once. Everyone who used A^xN—both newspapers and advertising departments—were very happy with it.

2. Sheila Field’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. Kedar Stanbury’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Von Jones’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. Chuck Allen’s page is here.

6. Gary Veran’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. Laurie Hamilton’s LinkedIn page is here.

8. Jennifer Hung’s LinkedIn page is here.

2002-2005 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 2

Posted on March 5, 2022 by Mike

Selling newspapers on the use of AxN. Continue reading →

A^xN was an Internet-based product developed and marketed by TSI. It allowed advertisers to send insertion orders (reservations for advertising space) to newspapers. It also managed communication between the two parties that culminated in the newspaper rep confirming the order. The process that Denise Bessette and I employed in designing and creating A^xN, including the division of labor, was described here. Details of the system design are posted here.

Part 1 of the marketing of A^xN is posted here. The narrative concludes with the signing of a contract by representatives of Belk¹, the department store chain based in Charlotte, NC, to purchase AdDept, TSI’s administrative system for advertising departments of large retailers. Part of the plan for the installation was to use A^xN for insertion orders. At the time none of the other AdDept retailers were using A^xN yet.

In the previous thirty or so AdDept installations the scheduling of newspaper advertising in AdDept had almost never been very difficult. It was always the first part of the project that we got to work smoothly.

I encountered an unexpected problem in that area at Belk. The company had recently consolidated the administration of four of its divisions into the office in Charlotte. Each of the four previous newspaper coordinators was now working in the office there and managed the advertising for the same papers that they had before. Usually, I trained the manager of the coordinators or just the AdDept liaison about how the programs worked. He or she trained the individual coordinators. In this case there was, at least initially, no manager. I was expected to train each of the coordinators separately. Most of them had been scheduling ads manually and ordering them over the phone. Some had never even worked on a computer before. Worst of all, all four soon realized that there was no way that Belk would need four coordinators when AdDept was up and running. There was not much incentive to cooperate.

Eventually these issues were all resolved, but the delays that the process caused meant that the rollout of A^xN would be postponed for a month or two. That was a headache, but it actually proved to be something of a blessing for TSI. It gave Denise and me some time to develop a plan for getting the newspapers aboard. Here is a list of the most important items:

TSI’s accounting system would needed to be changed to accommodate the newspapers as customers. Because the client file used a three-digit number as the identifying field, this task involved a significant amount of programming.
Belk would provide TSI with a list of its newspapers. For each we needed the contact name, phone, email, and address. These would be entered into TSI’s accounting system as (potential) customers. The three-character codes organized them by state. We also needed the name and contact information of the advertising rep at the paper.
I wrote a letter to be sent to the newspapers. It would be signed by someone at Belk but mailed by TSI. The purpose was to ask them to participate in a three-month test period of A^xN with no charge. Afterwards they would be asked to continue to use the system with a monthly fee roughly equal to the price of one column inch of advertising. One full-page ad in a broadsheet contained over 120 column inches.
Each newspaper would be sent the A^xN: Handbook for Newspaper Users, a copy of which is posted here. TSI would also provide telephone support, but we hoped that it would seldom be needed. We knew how to make systems that were easy to use.
At the same time the newspapers would be sent a contract for the test period. It emphasized that there was no charge for three months and that TSI was not acting as an agent for Belk. It also limited TSI’s responsibility to making a good-faith effort to address all reported problems in an expeditious manner.
After a week or so someone representing TSI would need to call the newspapers that had not returned contracts.
As soon as signed contracts were received, a TSI employee would activate the papers on the company’s accounting system and on the A^xN database. Then he/she would notify the appropriate coordinator at Belk to change the field on each variation of the newspaper’s record on the pub table in AdDept.
I would carefully monitor the processing of the first batch of orders. The system had never been stress-tested.
A second letter (from me) and a permanent contract would be sent to the paper after two months. It emphasized that either side could cancel the contract at any time with one month’s notice. The language about agency and responsibility was the same as in the contract for the test period. The starting date was at the end of the test period. There was no ending date.
When the contracts were returned the client records in TSI’s accounts receivable system were marked as active, and the newspapers were billed for the first month or quarter (their choice).
After a week or so someone representing TSI would need to call the newspapers that had not yet returned contracts.

This was by and large a good plan, but it had one rather obvious flaw. None of TSI’s current employees was suitable to play the role of “someone representing TSI” in steps 6 and 11. The programmers, including Denise, were far too busy with request for custom work in AdDept. The slot of marketing director at TSI was empty. I did not trust the administrative person to do this. That left only me, and I was notoriously bad at interactions by telephone. I have always hated talking on the phone, and people can often sense my discomfort. Besides, I wrote all of the new code. It was unquestionably a bad idea for the developer and the sales rep to be the same person. The sales person needs to know how to work with the potential customers, not the machine.

Denise devised a great solution to this problem. She informed me that one of her husband Ray’s cousins, Bob Wroblewski, sometimes did similar work for companies on a commission-only basis. She also came up with a sliding scale of commission rates. It was high in the first year and decreased in subsequent years. After three (or maybe five—I am not certain) years, there would be no commission.

We invited Bob, who lived in Rhode Island, to come to TSI’s office in East Windsor to discuss the matter with us. He liked what he heard, and I was favorably impressed with his experience and communication skills. He agreed to take on the job for Belk’s papers. After that we would assess how well the arrangement worked for both parties.

In reality it worked very well indeed for all of us. Bob was able to persuade all of the papers to agree to the test period. On that fateful day that Belk sent its first batch of insertion orders to TSI my recollection is that more than one hundred papers were involved. The A^xN programs flawlessly handled the orders and wrote the appropriate records on the data files. Emails were then sent to all of the newspaper reps. Very little time lapsed between the sending of the emails and the reps signing on to look at the orders. That surprised me a little.

Then a terrible thing happened. TSI’s trusty AS/400 locked up! No one—not even TSI employees—could do anything. I signed on to the system console, for which the operating system always reserved the highest priority. I was able to examine several job logs, and I determined that one of the steps that was being executed as soon as a rep looked at an order was performing an unexpectedly high amount of disk processing and using an inordinate amount of memory. I killed the interactive jobs for all of the newspaper and made sure that no one else could start a new session until the problem was addressed.

This was one of the tensest situations that I had faced in my career. I had to fix this problem, and fast. The step that I had determined was jamming the system would not be necessary until the rep decided to print the order or maybe it was the option to download the order as a csv file. I changed the code on the fly so that the onerous step was postponed until it was necessary. I hoped that that would spread out the activity so that the system was not overwhelmed right after a new order was processed.

There was no time to test what I had done. I removed the routine from the initial opening of the order and installed it in the routine that might be executed later. We then sent an email to the papers with an apology and a request that they try to sign in again. This worked much better, and, in fact, A^xN never had any notable performance problems again.

After Belk had been running successfully on A^xN for a few months, we decided to take our show on the road. Bob and I flew to California to meet with employees from two AdDept clients, Robinsons-May² and Gottschalks³. We enjoyed a pretty good relationship with both of them, and I wanted them to feel comfortable about working with Bob. I think that we spent only one afternoon at each location.

I don’t remember the details of the travel arrangements. We must have rented a car and driven from the L.A. area to Fresno. I don’t remember where we stayed or what we ate. I only remember that I was limping when I got off the plane, and I explained to Bob that I had tendinitis in my IT band. He said something like, “Don’t we all?”

Robinsons-May was quite interested in what we were doing with A^xN, but they did not go crazy over it. When I later asked them to let us approach their papers, however, they quickly agreed, and Bob was eventually able to sign up almost all of their papers, including the L.A. Times and the Los Angeles News Group, which included the Daily News and a group of suburban papers.

Some IT guys attended our demo at Gottschalks. They uniformly thought that our approach was great. However, the newspaper manager in the advertising department, whose name was Stephanie Medlock, had never used the faxing feature, and I never persuaded her to use A^xN either.

The trip was worthwhile. The people in both advertising departments had an opportunity to meet Bob, and he had a chance to see what it was like in an advertising department. Bob I got to know each other a little better, and Bob got a better idea about how A^xN fit into the process. However, I don’t think that he ever comprehended why it would be very difficult for us to approach advertising departments at places like Home Depot or Walmart—who did not have AdDept—about using A^xN.

Jenifer, Ali, Denise, and Bob at L&T’s office in Manhattan. This was the only photo of Bob that I could find.

Bob also accompanied Denise and me on a trip to Lord & Taylor⁴, the May Company division with headquarters in New York City. We took Amtrak and a taxi. I did not have any recollection of that trip at all until I found the photo that Bob appeared in. I don’t know when we went, but it must have been before 2005, the year in which I purchased my Cascio point-and-shoot camera for our second trip to Italy and stopped purchasing disposable cameras.

We met with Jennifer Hoke and Ali Flack, the two newspaper coordinators. I know this because I wrote their names on the reverse side of the photo that I found.

On the morning of October 14, 2003, I served as a pall bearer at a funeral in Passumpsic, VT, for Phil Graziose, the husband of my wife Sue’s good friend, Diane Robinson. After the funeral I drove to Providence, RI, for the wake of Bob’s wife. I have only attended perhaps a dozen wakes and funerals in my adult life. It was stunning to do it twice in one day.

Bob continued to represent us in dealings with newspapers until we ran out of prospects. From the beginning it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Bob earned a good amount of money in commissions, and the A^xN product complemented AdDept very well right to the end.

Over the years Bob and I had very few interactions other than the ones that I have described. Neither Denise nor I ever monitored his conversations with the newspapers. I always suspected that he may have overstated how important A^xN was to the retailers who paid for the newspaper ads, but what do you want? He was a salesman.

1. The people and events involved in the installation of AdDept at Belk and TSI’s relationship with the company are described here.

2. Robinsons-May was the May Company division based in North Hollywood, CA. My adventures in Tinsel Town are recounted here.

3. Gottschalks was an independent chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. The company’s AdDept installation—including one of the worst experiences of my life—is discussed in some detail here.

4. The twenty-year relationship between TSI and L&T is explored in the blog entry posted here.

2002-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Belk

Posted on March 5, 2022 by Mike

A study in Charlotte. Continue reading →

In the fall of 2002 I received a call from Bob Bowden, the IT Director at Belk, a chain of department stores that was (and still is in 2023) based in Charlotte, NC. He said that the company was closing its four regional divisions and bringing all the administration into Charlotte. He also told me that Belk was an AS/400 shop, and he was very happy to learn that we had developed software on that platform. He asked me to schedule a trip to Charlotte to demonstrate the system and to talk with the people in the advertising department. One of those people was Ellen Horn. I already knew Helen from the time that she was employed at Hecht’s (introduced here), but that was nearly a decade earlier.

A direct flight to Charlotte to 2 hours and 5 minutes.

This call was a godsend for TSI. The pool of prospective AdDept users had shrunk dramatically over the dozen or so years that we had been marketing the product to large retail advertisers. Moreover, our existing clients had at that point curtailed their desires for custom programming. TSI’s programmers were still busy, but the future did not appear as bright as before. Furthermore, we were without a marketing director, and our most recent efforts at mailings had turned up nothing. Best of all, Belk already had AS/400’s. Hardware costs would therefore be minimal, and we did not need to worry about convincing anyone of the critical importance of a relational database or the viability of the AS/400.

The AmeriSuites Airport hotel in Charlotte. I am pretty sure that it is no longer in business.

I immediately made arrangement in late October for a trip to Charlotte, a city with which I was somewhat familiar because of the time that I had spent there working with the Cato Corporation (introduced here). There were several direct flights on US Airways between Hartford and Charlotte.

I stayed—because of Bob’s recommendation—at the AmeriSuites hotel that was directly across the street from the headquarters building. Belk had a discounted rate there. The hotel had a shuttle service to and from the airport, and so I did not need to rent a car. That was fine for the first trip, but after the installation and the contract I rented a car so that I did not feel imprisoned.

I sent them a tape of the AdDept system and the sample data that I would use in the demo. Bob had told me that Belk had a nice theater in which I could make my presentation. People from the IT, Advertising, and Accounting departments would be in attendance. As usual, I spent the first day talking with users. In the morning of the second day I made adjustments to the demo system and tested everything that I planned to show.

Travel to Belk was easy. US Airways had several direct flights daily from Bradley International to Charlotte. Belk’s headquarters was a short drive from the airport.

I have been able to locate copies of fewer of my notes written for TSI’s employees, especially Denise Bessette, TSI’s VP of Application Development than I thought likely. I discovered notes from fifteen trips, as well as many outlines of programming projects. However, there are two big gaps in the notes that I brought back to TSI’s office. There are no reports dated between March of 2003 and December of 2006, and the last set is for February of 2009. I am almost certain that I made trips in 2004 and 2005, and I am absolutely positive that I visited Belk several times after 2009. Unfortunately, I have needed to rely on my memory for both of those periods.

Belk was unlike any other AdDept installation. The spacious and modern headquarters that stood in the midst of dozens of trees was about to be deluged with employees transferred from the other four divisions. It would undoubtedly be true that many of them would be superfluous in the consolidated setting. After all, cutting expenses, especially payroll expenses, was the usual motivation for the move. In the case of the advertising department, at least, the introduction of AdDept was bound to streamline many tasks.

One thing about the AS/400 setup at Belk really surprised me. Here is what I wrote:

AdDept resides on an AS/400 model 720 running V4R5. The system is also used for the Lawson accounts payable and general ledger systems and J.D. Edwards systems that are used for co-op billing and job costing. They hope to eliminate the J.D. Edwards system. They plan to upgrade the system in 2003. Dean Hajnas, who works for IBM, is the system operator for the AS/400. IBM manages the system for them. All requests for new user profiles and changes to user profiles must go through IBM. Belk employees are not allowed to touch the hardware.

That’s right; the Belk IT employees had absolutely no control over their own hardware. They had outsourced the management of the system to IBM. Quite a few IBM employees worked full-time in the Belk complex.

I met with a large number of people on the first visit, most of whom were new to me.

Ellen Horn’s title is media manager. Greg Case¹ and Jennifer Lennon² are ROP coordinators. I think that Bob Alexander³ is, too, but he was out. Debbie Edwards does broadcast, but I think that she works for Ellen. Steve Kelly⁴ is the Business Manager. Steve Yeager⁵, who is responsible for the massive network of spreadsheets, and Jan Adams work for him. I am not sure who is responsible for what. Tim Scott⁶, Miriam West (print production), Sherry Webb, and Amy Petrone attended the direct mail meeting. The last two run the data base marketing (Harte Hanks) system.
Ellen, Greg, Jennifer, and Steve Yeager have usable user profiles. They use PComm (like the May Company). They have one printer, which is everyone’s default – PRTA209. It was out of toner on Thursday.

The project manager for the AdDept installation worked in the IT department. Her name was Pat Cagle.⁷ If we needed something fixed in the system specs, the operating system, or the hardware, we dealt with her. She knew next to nothing about advertising.

I am pretty sure that this is Ellen Horn.

I remember that on one of the first visits Pat gave me a form on which I was asked to describe the AdDept system. I tried to get out of it, but she insisted. I composed a few paragraphs and gave them to her. I never heard about it again. What we ended up doing probably bore little resemblance to my essay.

The headquarters building had quite a bit of security. Passage through some doors required an employee badge; others required special badges. When visitors first arrived, the receptionist made a badge for each person who had an appointment, but the visitor’s badge did not allow them to go through the secure doors, and they still had to wait for an employee to come down to the reception area to escort them. Anyone who went out had to go through this again.

The alternative—which I admit that I sometimes employed—was to wait for an employee to come in or out and sneak through before the door closed. I occasionally just stuffed my badge in my pocket. Nobody ever demanded to see it. I always turned the badge in at the security desk before going back to New England.

I learned a little about the company’s history. Belk at the time had more than 200 stores and used 180 newspapers. Their biggest markets were Charlotte and Raleigh. Their stores were also in a large number of small markets, including Mt. Airy, NC, Andy Griffith’s home town and the model for Mayberry. I later learned from Steve Yeager, who kept a copy of a book about the company’s history on his desk, that it was a privately-owned corporation dominated by men named Belk. Over the years they made partnership deals with other retailers, most of whom they eventually bought out. That part of the operation, which began in 1888, had ended, but there were still a sizeable number of high-ranking executives in the building with same four-letter last name. Belk had that, but almost nothing else, in common with the Cato Corporation.

I can find no notes for it, but I must have made another trip to Belk after the one in which I collected specs for the Design Document and the detailed proposal. I remember another meeting in the theater in which I demoed the AdDept system. It was attended by a Vice President in the Accounting Department. Although I no longer recall his name, he made quite an impression on me. When I mentioned that I would not be able to come to Belk on a specified date because I had minor dental surgery scheduled, he said that I could come anyway, and he would do the job in the evening. I asked him if amateur dentistry was one of his hobbies. He only smirked.

Later, when I talked about using a fax card on the AS/400 for insertion orders, he volunteered—with no prompting—a question about whether the Internet could be used for transmission of the orders. That was how the subject of A^xN was first mentioned at the first retailer to use it in an operational setting! The design of A^xN is described here. The story of its marketing begins here.

I undoubtedly stayed at the AmeriSuites that day as well. It might have been on that occasion that I had my first opportunity to eavesdrop on Italians speaking their native tongue. There were very few people at the hotel. When I went to breakfast, the hotel’s restaurant was empty except for a small group of Italian men. I was not very far along in my study of the Italian language (introduced here), but I was delighted at my success at following a substantial portion of the conversation of my fellow diners. My wife Sue and I by that time had already scheduled our first trip to Italy for May of 2003. That journey has been described here.

The first Belk store was called New York Racket.

I remember trying to train the four ROP ladies from the divisions that had been discontinued. There might have been a fifth person supervising them. I made the long trek from the Advertising Department to the area that had been set aside for them. I have no records of any of their names, but I was required to give personalized training to each of them one at a time.

What is wrong with this picture? No, not the old photo; I mean the scene I depicted in the above paragraph. In the first place it surely would have been more cost-effective to have me conduct an ROP class that included all of them or, if that was not feasible, to train one person and let that person train the others. What kind of business pays an outsider $900 per day plus expenses to provide individual training for inexperienced clerks?

That was not the worst part. All of these ladies had moved to Charlotte so that they could continue doing the jobs to which they were accustomed. My training emphasized how fast ads could be entered and how fast and easy everything else was after that. The unfortunate result was that they all had to be comforted and assured that there would still be a place for them in the Belk organization. Maybe so, but I don’t think that it was in ROP.

I remember that shortly after these training sessions someone, perhaps Steve Kelly, asked me how many employees were required to manage ROP in other AdDept installations. I told him that it was hard to say because some also produced advertising schedules and some also verified charges from newspapers. However, I could think of no installation that had more than a couple of people.

By the time of my trip to Belk in February of 2003, data entry was in full swing, and I needed to make sure that everything was going smoothly.

It was sleeting on the evening that I arrived in Charlotte. I must have rented a car because I remember that the short drive from the airport to the hotel was horrendous. The roads had not been treated at all, and everyone was driving at less than 15 mph (and could not get up hills) or more than 50 mph (and was skidding this way and that). I was one of the few drivers on the Billy Graham Parkway who was doing a safe moderate speed. This kind of weather occurred at least once a year in New England. The temperature was above freezing; if the roads had been treated, they would only have been wet. Even if they weren’t, most New England drivers would compensate in a reasonable manner.

This is what a “state of emergency” looks like in Charlotte, NC.

I made my way around all of the idiotic drivers to the hotel. There I found out that my reservation had been moved to another AmeriSuites hotel several miles away in Arrowood. When I protested, the lady informed me that the entire city was in a state of emergency. I got in my car and drove south to Arrowood.

The next morning I drove to Belk. I reported in my notes what I found: “Belk did not open until 10:30 on Monday because of ice on the roads. Many people came in later than that. Some key players did not make it in on Monday at all.”

I mused to myself that I should have driven down to Charlotte in a truck filled with salt. I could have made a fortune on the black market.

I accomplished very little on that trip. The only good thing about this trip was that I found a better hotel for future trips.

The first priority in 2003, of course, was to get all of the ads entered into the AdDept database for the season that started in February. The people in the Advertising Business Office tried to run parallel financial closings for February and March. I spent a lot of time creating queries for them/ I worked most closely with Russ Taylor⁸ and the controllers, Karen Pardue⁹ and Debbie Morris¹⁰.

Eventually this installation included many interfaces with other applications, most of which also running on AS/400s. The implementation of the first interface involved the uploading of quantities for their direct mail and insert pieces. There were several disconcerting entries about it in my notes from the March trip:

I wrote a program for handling the direct mail quantities file, a sample of which I did not receive until Tuesday. It is DN172, which is option 1 on BELKDM.
I wrote instructions for uploading the quantities file and sent them to Steve Kelly, Steve Yeager, and Pat Cagle. Steve Yeager forwarded his copy to Tim Scott.
Tim Scott said that it takes six hours to run the query to produce one file for a month which shows direct mail quantities by store by month. Tim and his two employees cannot use the system while the query is running! As of Friday, there were still no quantities.
Belk must come up with a process for getting the store quantities file to the IFS. They do not have Client Access.

One of the early finance meetings at Belk. The short woman at the far end of the table is Karen Pardue. On her left are Steve Yeager and Steve Kelly. I think that the blonde with the big red mug is Debbie Morris. I don’t recognize the others.

Client Access was an IBM program that provided both terminal emulation and the ability to transfer files from or to a PC client. IFS stands for Integrated File System. Version 4 of the AS/400 operating system provided for storage of several types of files, including PC files, on the system. I cannot imagine a query on the native file system of an AS/400 taking hours. This is what the system does best. I wonder what system Tim Scott’s program was on.

I found nine files that contained lengthy outlines of closing issues that were dated April 15 through 17 of 2003. I evidently spent a week at Belk trying to close to close February and March in AdDept. There were still a lot of open issues on both files for Friday.

In May there are five .prn files (probably output files from queries on some system) that are labeled “Your CoQuery Mabelk”. They appear to have one line per store. I have no recollection about any of them, and the formats do not look familiar.

There are no other files of my notes until 2006. I cannot explain the gap, but there was a huge change in attitude when Denise Podavini¹¹ took over management of the Advertising Business Office in December of that year.

My notes from the visit in December of 2006 are fragmentary, but I also found several documents dated in that month in a folder called “Month End” in the Belk folder. Two of them were FAQs. The first, which was less than a page in length, explained the steps involved in setting up store allocation percentages for each pub in every media. The second, which was a little longer, explained how AdDept approached the challenge of allocating costs to stores. I have posted it here.

The others were specific “game plans” for Belk. One was a nine-page document that outlined the procedures for allocating all advertising costs at Belk. It had five “tracks”: I have posted this impressive document, which includes a few action items, here. The other two dealt with the difficult but critically important (but uncomfortably complex) process of making sure that all of the systems and processes involved were in sync. They have been posted here and here.

I should emphasize two things. 1) The processes described in these documents required that all ads in all media and all expenses and credits be recorded in AdDept. 2) All of the interfaces between AdDept and the other systems must have already been designed, constructed, and at least to some extent tested. Therefore, a great deal of interaction between Belk and TSI must have occurred in the years between 2003 and 2006.

At any rate the pace definitely picked up speed under Denise’s leadership. The January 2007 meeting involved a new project called the Printer-Shipper Report. Vee Hefney¹² and Kari Bates¹³ produced this report in order to indicate to the printers and/or shippers the quantity of copies of each direct mail or insert piece to be produced and delivered. TSI had already delivered AdDept’s version of this report, but on this trip I gathered specs for changes to it, for a method of automating delivery of the information to the advertising records area, and for several related projects.

Special events was usually the last area of an advertising department that I dealt with. The people there managed unique in-store promotions like celebrity appearances and trunk sales by vendors. During the July visit to Belk I met with Leigh Ann Lyle, Rochelle Franklin¹⁵, and Bridgett Barbee¹⁵, who were involved with this area. Sixteen years later I can summon forth only a dim recollection of these meetings.

I also spent a lot of time with Denise Podavini on this and every other visit. I returned to the office with a fairly long list of requests. By this time we had produced forty-two programming quotations for Belk in addition to those listed in the Design Document and initial proposal. Most of the quotes had been accepted, delivered, billed, and paid for.

The October trip was notable for two things. It was the first mention of the application that someone had developed for managing vendor contracts in Lotus Notes¹⁷. Sanjay Singh¹⁸, an IT employee, said that he would provide the layout of a file that we could import into AdDept. The other notable item was that the top item on the to-do list was Belk’s fifty-ninth request for custom programming.

My visit in May of 2008 centered on co-op. The fact that I still needed to do setup work in this area five years after the installation puzzled me when I researched it. Perhaps the use of the Lotus Notes program for co-op contracts affected the progress. Although several problems were uncovered, we must have dealt with them. The last line on my update report is “Everyone was very appreciative of the work. They can definitely see the value of this project.”

We did not receive requests like the following every day:

The Lotus Notes database will at some point in the not too distant future be replaced with something. So, they would like the BELKLNI menu to be called BELKCOOPI, and they would like all references to Lotus Notes to be changed to co-op contract database or something like that.

By this time Belk had acquired most of the Parisian (introduced here) stores. TSI had to deal with several problems involving the transition.

I made two trips in June. The first one dealt mostly with issues in the interface with the co-op contract database. I also spent a fair amount of time cleaning up the co-op transactions and reconciling the co-op accrual entry for May. Denise P. and I had to make several changes to the .csv file for the journal entry to be uploaded to Lawson. The last entry in the notes for this trip had very good news.

I ran the actual cost accounting by store for February through May in order to check the results of DACAJOBST. I could not find any problems. In all cases the total media and production costs seem to match and the store breakdowns seemed reasonable.

I came back later in the month to help with the reconciliation of co-op for June. The list of open issues after that visit contained only five items, and three of them were requests for new programming.

The topic for the first visit in September was the merchandise cost accounting system, which required another interface with the sales system. This one was for sales by department by month. It was very challenging to try to reconcile the results of the merchandise allocation program with the results of the program that allocated costs to stores. I don’t think that I ever attempted this at any other installation. Nevertheless, after quite a number of adjustments, I reported that “July matched the store cost accounting in media, production, and co-op.”

The last entry on the Issues page of my notes was short but powerful: “I got the specs for a gigantic use tax/sales tax¹⁸ project.” My write-up of the project’s specs can be found here.

I came back the next week to help finish the cost accounting reconciliations and discuss the details of the use tax project. Denise P. needed something to address the immediate problem of calculating the use tax liability in each jurisdiction.

I wrote five queries in ADVQRY for Denise P. so that she could estimate their use tax liability for this season.
BOOKS092 creates a file with all direct mail and insert ads that have printing costs. It must be run first.
BKMED092, BKPOST092, and BKOTH092 calculate the costs for media, postage and other for all the ads in the file created by BOOKS092. The results are stored in files.
BKALL092 ties the four files together to print the report.

I think that this was the first time since the Amtrak rides to Macy’s East back in the eighties that I visited an AdDept client on two consecutive weeks.

The use tax project was installed in January of 2009. It seemed to go pretty well. One issue that was reported exemplifies how complicated this project was.

Request #95¹⁹ stated: “At month end, if the ad ran in that month or a previous month, the sales tax amount will be moved to the (liability) account specified on the sub-account. Thus, sales tax will be treated like every other sub-account.” This is not quite correct. They will have one sales tax sub-account, but there are sales tax liability accounts for each store. One store’s account will be associated with the state. The amount should NOT be allocated to stores when the month end program is run. Instead, a store should be specified on the sub-account, and 100% should go to that state.

I also spent more time reconciling the store and departmental cost accounting. At this point they were using both of them extensively.

Of course, they needed to project the cost of use tax when they were planning. The last entry for the visit was this question to Denise B.: “Denise P. needs the projected use tax for her reports. Is that ready? She hopes to have the projected costs by store the first week of February.”

The last file of notes that I have is dated at the end of February, 2009. I am almost positive that I returned to Belk several times after that, but I have no record of any of those trips.

At some point after this Denise P. told me that Belk planned to outsource the buying of newspaper space. I told her that this would have a dire, perhaps even catastrophic, effect on TSI’s financial position because most of their papers subscribed to A^xN, and very few of them were used by any other AdDept client. She asked me how much money we would be losing. I told her. I was shocked when she promised to make up the difference. Evidently they expected to save a lot of money—most presumably in payroll—by outsourcing.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but this demonstrated quite a different point of view from when Belk promised to keep all five of its ROP coordinators back in 2003 and gave each of them personalized training in how to use AdDept to schedule newspaper ads.

Life in Charlotte: I happened upon a restaurant that I really liked called Skyland Family Restaurant. It was near one of the major north-south streets, South Blvd., but it was facing a side street. I drove past it once or twice even after I knew where I was going. After I discovered Skyland, I went there at least once on each trip. I am happy to report that it still seemed to be open for business in 2023.

The restaurant was owned by a Greek family. Everything that I ever ordered there was abundant, good, and inexpensive. My favorite was the pork chop meal. They also provided free refills on iced tea.

Several interior walls of the restaurant contained large water-color paintings that depicted unusual things. I am sure that I took some photos with my Canon point-and-shoot camera. However, I could not find them. The photo at the left is from the Internet.

I always ate by myself, and it was never very crowded. I suspect that they did more business at lunch time than in the evening. While waiting for my order I usually read something, usually the latest issue of Acquerello Italiano.

One occasion in 2008 stands out among my memories. A group of men were meeting in the back room, which was to the left of the area visible in the above photo. They were discussing in a serious and energetic manner what they could do to help Congressman Ron Paul of Kentucky win the Republican nomination for president. I had heard of Ron Paul, of course, but I did not take him seriously. Subsequently, I came to understand that he was a heroic figure to many Libertarians.

I went to several other restaurants. I have no complaints about any of them, but for me the experience at Skyland was both unique and very enjoyable.

After the first trip I always rented a car. I stayed at the AmeriSuites a couple of times and at Hyatt Place—also within walking distance of Belk’s headquarters—at least once. I went for a run almost every evening that I was in Charlotte. On the occasions that I was near Belk’s headquarters I ran around the park-like complex in which Belk was located and along the major road to the southeast of it, West Tyvola.

For most of my later visits the Hampton Inn in Arrowood, a neighborhood about five miles south of Belk, was my base. Even if it had not offered both free breakfasts and Hilton Honors points, I would have preferred it. The rooms were nicer, the service was better, and fairly often they had some free food in the evenings. It only took me ten or fifteen minutes to get to Belk, and there were some good places to eat in the vicinity.

I ran around a business park that was less than a block from the Hampton Inn. It wasn’t as nice an experience as running in a real park, but it sufficed for my purposes.

The only other type of recreation in which I participated was bridge. On one evening I played with Denise’s father²⁰ at the Charlotte Bridge Club. I am pretty sure that it was in 2010 because I remember that I had just become a Live Master. We had a mediocre result. I made a few mistakes.

He told me that Denise never had any interest in the game, but he was teaching her daughter how to play. He also mentioned that he knew Simon Kantor, whom I had once played against back in New England.

The Work Environment: The headquarters building was spectacular. The most annoying thing, as I described above, was dealing with security. The parking lot was huge. I usually got there early enough to take one of the slots reserved for visitors, but if they were full, I might need to walk quite a distance from my car to the front door.

It was also a pretty good hike from the advertising area to the cafeteria and the IT area, but I did not need to make those trips more than once per day. The cafeteria was worth the trek. The food was quite good, as was the selection. The prices were quite reasonable.

Once on nearly every trip Denise P. and I would go out for lunch. I always paid and billed it back to Belk. Her two favorite places were O’Charley’s and a Chinese restaurant called Dragon Buffet.

O’C’s was OK, but DB was my favorite because they allowed diners to serve themselves and take as much as they wanted. I generally had consumed two bowls of Won Ton soup and then some ginger chicken wings. I think that there were also free refills on iced tea.

These were all legitimate business lunches. There was no booze, and Denise and I talked about almost nothing except business. As soon as we had finished eating we returned to the office.

Back in 2003 I cannot say that I had a lot of respect for the people with whom I worked at Belk. However, after Denise P. was brought in, my opinion improved a lot. It may be that she sheltered me from some people who might frustrate me.

One peculiar thing that I remember about the advertising department was the fact that Ellen Horn always had a Golden Retriever in her office. Evidently she was training them to be emotional support dogs.

There also seemed to be a paucity of printers. I remember that on quite a few occasions I walked a considerable distance to pick up a report and then had to wait for someone else’s job to finish. When I was doing reconciliations, I often needed small reports fast. This was frustrating.

The beautiful headquarters building is vacant in 2023.

Epilogue: Belk survived intact longer than almost all of the regional department store chains with whom TSI dealt. However, in 2016, a few years after my last trip to Charlotte, the company had redesigned its headquarters. Because I always thought of Belk’s digs as better than any of the other department stores, this news surprised me. Imagine my shock when I read that in 2021 Belk decided to close this location entirely. Evidently they expect most people to work remotely and some to be stashed away in stores. I don’t understand how this could possibly work. Where, for example, are the computers?

That last decision was not made by the Belk family. In 2015 the company was acquired by Sycamore Partners. For the first time ever it would be run by someone not named Belk. The new CEO was not even a man!

On January 20, 2021, Belk declared bankruptcy, but the next day it emerged with an approved plan. This website claimed that in May of 2023 Belk still had 294 stores. That seems incredible to me. I wonder how many of those are “outlets”.

1. According to LinkedIn Greg Case still was working for Belk in 2023, as were quite a few of the people whom I could locate on LinkedIn. His profile page is posted here.

2. Jennifer Lennon’s LinkedIn page is here.

3. Bob Alexander’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

4. Steve Kelly’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. For the first part of the installation I worked with Steve Yeager a lot. I remember that he said that he was originally from somewhere in Massachusetts. I am not sure how he ended up in Charlotte. I also remember that he had a fancy car of some sort (as opposed to my ten-year-old Saturn). He told me that he liked the way that he looked in it. I found Steve’s LinkedIn page here.

6. Tim Scott’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. Pat Cagle’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

8. I had not encountered anyone like Russ Taylor. Someone once asked him if he had graduated from the University of South Caroling. He answered solemnly, “Yes, I am a cock!” He also used to sneak out every so often for a cigarette break. His LinkedIn page is here.

9. I worked with Karen Pardue on virtually every trip until she moved to another position. Her LinkedIn page is here.

10. Debbie Morris assisted Karen Pardue. In 2008 she assumed management of co-op. Her LinkedIn page is here.

11. TSI had a long and productive relationship with Denise Podavini, who was born and raised in New England. I found her LinkedIn page here. It still lists her as directing the financial aspects of the advertising department, but I wonder if, given the drastic changes at the company, that is still accurate.

12. I remember Vee quite well. I briefly met with her on several trips. Her LinkedIn page is here.

13. Kari Bates eventually took over Vee Heffney’s job. Her LinkedIn page is here.

14. Rochelle Franklin’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

15. Bridgett Barbee’s LinkedIn page is available here.

16. I was mildly amused to hear at one of the later meetings that the IT people, or more likely employees of an ambitious software vendor, were investigating the feasibility of replicating in Lotus Notes what AdDept did. IBM had purchased Lotus Development Corporation in 1995, primarily to get its hands on Lotus Notes, a product designed to make it easier for workers to collaborate. I had done a little research on that software. I could have told them that they would be crazy to try to use it as a comprehensive multi-user database. They would be sending a boy to do a man’s job. After a few months they came to the same conclusion.

17. Sanjay Singh’s LinkedIn page is here.

18. According to Denise P., nearly every jurisdiction expected Belk to pay use tax on certain aspects of the cost of creating a direct mail catalog or an insert. The rates and what portion was taxable varied by jurisdiction. It seems incredible to me in retrospect that this had never been an issue in the previous six and a half years of the installation at Belk, and—even more mind-boggling—no other AdDept client had ever mentioned this issue. I have no idea how this could be possible. Almost all of the AdDept clients were in precisely the same business as Belk, and most used direct mail as much as Belk did.

19. I am pretty sure that we quoted and delivered more programming requests for Belk than for any other client. The request numbers were well into three digits when we closed TSI in 2014.

20. I think that Denise P.’s father’s name is David Wroblewski. I searched the American Contract Bridge League roster for players in Charlotte with lots of masterpoints and a Polish name. His was the only one.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: AS/400

2014 TSI: The Smooth Landing

2004-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Dick’s

1995-2009 TSI: AdDept Client: Macy’s West

2002-2005 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 2

2002-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Belk