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.

1997-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: The Bon-Ton

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Mike

The Bon-Ton is where? You get there how? Continue reading →

The Bon-Ton was a chain of department stores based in York, PA. For nearly a century the company was owned and operated by the Grumbacher family. In fact, Tim Grumbacher only retired from the company’s Board of Directors in 2017. So, for 119 out of the company’s 120 years of existence members of the family were closely involved with the ownership and/or management of the company.

In the years that TSI was involved with B-T, it was expanding fairly rapidly. I am pretty sure that the original call to TSI inquiring about the AdDept system was received in 1996 or 1997 and came from Jo Harnish¹, who was the Production and Finance Manager for the advertising department at B-T. This was an extremely unusual combination of responsibilities. Ordinarily the production manager and finance manager were separate people with markedly different skills.

Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director, talked with her and arranged for the two of us to come to York to make a presentation. We were surprised when they suggested that the easiest way to get to York was to fly to BWI Airport, which is south of Baltimore, MD, rent a car, and drive north for more than an hour. That’s what we did. At the time US Airways offered several nonstop flights to BWI every day.

My recollection is that the entrance was in that little alcove to the right of the Burlington Coat factory. That entire area later was transformed into a Walmart Supercenter.

The address that we were given for B-T’s corporate headquarters was 2801 E. Market St. It turned out to be in the middle of a fairly large strip mall. The door through which we entered was next to a Burlington Coat Factory outlet. There was only a very small sign on the door that indicated that the corporate offices lay within. I frankly wondered what kind of operation we were getting involved with.

I am sure that on that first trip we met with Jo and Tom Vranich², the Senior VP of advertising. I already knew Tom. My recollection is that I had talked with him briefly at the Retail Advertising Conference³ that Tom Moran and I had attended in Chicago in the early nineties. At the time Tom V. was the Advertising Director at Hess’s, a chain of department stores based in Allentown, PA.

I remember few of the details of B-T’s requirements. I seem to recall that the paper in York still printed twice a day. I am pretty certain that none of the requirements seemed insuperably difficult to me.

I also don’t recall much about the installation itself or the support trips to the Bon-Ton offices in the subsequent years. What I mostly remember was the time in the rental car. The drive to and from BWI was not particularly difficult, but it was time consuming.

I think that the hotel in which I stayed was behind the strip mall in which the Bon-Ton office was located, but the route to get back and forth was circuitous. I probably stayed at the Hampton Inn that was (and still is in 2022) located in that vicinity. I don’t remember any restaurants that I frequented in York. I think that I generally got take-out and ate in the hotel room. On the other hand, I can visualize parts of the highway and the Market St. area rather clearly.

At some point Bethann Matroni⁴ became the head of the advertising business office and our primary contact. The only notes that I could locate indicated that in 2001 she requested that we add a third rate for ROP (display ads for newspapers). The two rates that were already on AdDept’s media schedule file and the rate table represented the actual rate charged by the paper and a marked-up rate that was shown to the merchandise departments and, for co-op advertising, the vendors. The former was often called “net” and the latter “gross”, but because those terms were also used to mean something else, we just called them rate 1 and rate 2. I don’t recall that we ever added a rate 3 to these files.

At about the same time I talked with someone named Tina Hagarman, maintained the schedule for newspaper advertising and ordered the ads. According to my notes, she had just returned from maternity leave. I think that I was in York to explain to her how A^xN⁵, TSI’s system for management of insertion orders over the Internet, worked. The Bon-Ton was one of the first users of that system. I also promised to send Tina a copy of the booklet that I had made about inserts, the preprinted flyers that are sometimes included with the newspaper.

I think that I went into this store in Westfield once, but I don’t recall if I bought anything.

In 1998 I was startled to learn that the Bon-Ton⁶ was opening a store on Route 20 in Westfield, MA, which was not far at all from where my sister Jamie and her family were living at the time in West Springfield. The surprising thing was that it was the only Bon-Ton store in New England. I had to wonder how it could possibly be profitable to run only one store in an area. This was not part of an acquisition either. Someone at the Bon-Ton just decided that it would be a good idea to locate one of their department stores in this strip mall on the outskirts of a rather small town in western Massachusetts. It was also the last outpost of civilization before the sparsely populated Berkshires.

In 2003 the Bon-Ton surprised most of the retail world by acquiring the stores run by Elder-Beerman, another department store chain that had been using AdDept to manage its advertising. This move approximately doubled the size of the company in terms of the number of stores. The signage for the acquired stores still referenced Elder-Beerman, but management of the advertising for the combined operation was done at the Bon-Ton headquarters in York. Because both of the advertising departments already used both AdDept and A^xN, the transition was rather smooth. I don’t think that I even made a trip to York to oversee it.

I don’ t know how much the Bon-Ton paid for the logo.

In 2005 Bon-Ton somehow came up with $1.1 billion in cash to purchase the Northern Department Store group from Saks Inc. This group consisted of three former users of AdDept: P.A. Bergner, Younkers, and Herberger’s⁷. So, for the second time in two years the company doubled in size.

The advertising for this group was run out of Milwaukee. The facility in Milwaukee was much larger than the one in York. It had a large area devoted to the production of ads as well as a photo studio. The Bon-Ton closed the department with which we had worked in York and moved all of the advertising to Milwaukee. None of the people that we knew in York made the move to Milwaukee.

B-T’s incursion into New England did not stop at Westfield. This store in Concord, NH, was closed in 2018.

I knew very well that there was no possibility of persuading the Senior VP in Milwaukee, Ed Carroll, to use AdDept even if we agreed to let them use it for free. However, I did make an effort to contact the newspaper manager to see if we might interest them in using A^xN. It would have been difficult to construct an interface, but the new organization ran a lot of advertising in a very large number of papers. If I had succeeded in convincing him to use A^xN, TSI might have been able to limp along until the entire Bon-Ton retail empire after many consecutive unprofitable years gave up the ghost in 2018 and ended up selling all of its properties to liquidators.

I might have been mistaken about the Bon-Ton store in Westfield. It stayed open until the Bon-Ton declared bankruptcy in 2018. I don’t know whether it was ever profitable.

1. Jo Harnish’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

2. Tom Vranich’s LinkedIn page is here. On it he claims (three times) that he worked as Senior VP at the Bon-Ton for over thirty years. I am almost positive that for most of that period he was actually employed at other stores that were eventually acquired directly or indirectly by B-T. Also, since his name was not Grumbacher, I doubt that he started as Senior VP.

3. The adventures of Tom and Mike at the RAC in Chicago have been described here.

4. I could find little on the Internet about Bethann Matroni. I think that in 2022 she may be known as Bethann Brodbeck.

5. A detailed description of the genesis of the A^xN system has been posted here. Details about its structure can be found here.

6. A very detailed account of the long history of the Bon-Ton is posted here. Unfortunately it stops in 2001 just before things got really interesting.

7. Detailed blog entries have been posted about each of these installations: P.A. Bergner, Younkers, Herberger’s.

2000-2001 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 1

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Mike

Designing our flag and running it up the pole to see if anyone salutes. Continue reading →

By the spring of 2000 Denise Bessette and I had pretty well outlined the steps required to implement TSI’s new Internet product and agreed on the name A^xN (pronounced “A cross N”). It was a clearinghouse for insertion orders (reservations for advertising space) sent from advertisers (A) to newspapers (N). It also managed communications from both sides and allowed the newspapers to confirm the orders online. The process that Denise and I employed, including the division of labor, was described here. Details of the system design are posted here.

I should note that neither Denise nor I have a background in marketing. Most of our discussions about this project took place during the period shortly after Doug Pease, or marketing person left TSI. We had not yet replaced him.

The first non-technical question that we faced was how to fund the project. We never really thought about setting aside a pot of money, borrowing from a financial institution, or seeking investors. Instead, all of the coding made use of tools that we already had or were available at minimal cost. We knew that the company would eventually need to spend some money on marketing, but we had no idea how to budget for it in advance.

A critically important aspect was deciding how we would bill for the service. The insertion orders always originated with AdDept programs on the AS/400s used by TSI’s clients. However, for various reasons no more than twenty of them regularly produced insertion orders inside AdDept. We were already charging those companies a monthly fee for TSI’s support of the AS/400’s faxing software. How much more could we charge them? Most of them knew the limitations of faxing, but removing them was not a high priorities for any of them.

In 2022 the Tribune Company owns the Courant. The building that I visited has been abandoned.

On the other hand, the companies that used AdDept ran ads in hundreds of newspapers, and for most of those papers the department stores were by far the biggest purchasers of advertising. It was not unheard of tor some of these companies to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for ads in a single newspaper. In order to assess the situation better I scheduled appointments with executives at the two major papers that were within easy driving distance, the Hartford Courant and the Springfield Union News & Sunday Republican¹.

I explained our proposed approach to an executive at each publication.The lady at the Courant was not very enthusiastic about the idea, but she did say that the paper would consider whatever the customers wanted. She emphasized that the newspapers were already paying third-party services in order to receive the ads electronically.

The guy at the Republican was more engaging. He showed me the process of how his employees laid out an issue of the paper. They did not start by placing the stories in a way that would make the paper more attractive at the newsstand. They began by figuring out where the ads from Filene’s², the May Company’s department store chain that dominated New England, would run. He said that sometimes they did not receive the ads until minutes before press time—or even later. However, they always held the space for every ad that Filene’s had scheduled.

So, both Denise and I concluded that TSI should bill the newspapers for the service and to offer it to the advertisers as an alternative to faxing at the same price, thereby bringing their net costs to zero. The big questions were how much to bill the newspapers and how to frame it. It did not seem right to bill the large newspapers the same amount as the smaller ones. The pricing had to seem both moderate and equitable.

Denise came up with the idea of five or so tiered billing amounts, where the tiers were determined not by a paper’s circulation but by its published column-inch rate. These rates were available in a publication called Standard Rates and Data to which most advertising agencies in those days subscribed. I had seen the huge books lying around at our agency customers. I asked employees at Keiler Advertising if I could have an obsolete copy. They gladly located a fairly recent one and gave it to me. I discovered that the rates³ for newspaper advertising varied wildly. As I remember it, we decided to set the floor value for the top tier of A^xN rates at $150. So, any paper that with a standard rate of $150 or more per column inch would be charged $150 per month. Other papers would be charged proportionately less

This proved to be a rather easy concept to explain to the newspaper. Because the advertiser and the newspaper both benefited, the costs would be split between them. The newspaper rates were proportional to the publicly recognized value of the ads in their paper. Our fee was roughly equal to the price of one column inch of advertising space. The size of a full-page ad in a broadsheet newspaper was over 120 column inches. TSI’s fee would be a pittance to newspapers, most of which were still thriving financially in the early twenty-first century. If we could present the system as reducing the number of misunderstandings, the cost for the newspaper could easily be justified if even one free make-good were eliminated every few years.

In 2001 I made two trips to locations of AdDept clients to assess the feasibility of A^xN for both the advertisers and the newspapers. The first trip was in January of 2001 to Houston, a city with two large AdDept installations, Stage Stores⁴ and Foley’s⁵. I gave fairly detailed demonstrations to the buyers of newspaper space at both locations. I showed the system to Stage Stores first. Here are some of my notes from that trip.

The AxN presentation went pretty well. Becky (Newman), the production manager, made a point to tell me that she was very interested in it. They also gave me a lot of suggestions as to what they needed, especially in the inserts area.
After the demo Becky showed me the AdDirect⁶ website. It is in many ways similar to ours. They list all of their clients. The only retailers are M&F⁸, L&T₉ (who doesn’t use them), Stage, and Office Depot. The coolest thing about the site is that you can determine which fields are displayed as columns (but not the order of the columns). You can also specify up to three sorting fields. Finally, you can specify a filter to limit the list. Stage would like all of these. They would be less useful to others.
Stage pays AdDirect $10,000 per month. They plan to negotiate the charge down.
… Fort Worth(less) Star Telegram invoice for $500K. Foley’s never indicated that they thought that the papers would be reluctant to pay a little for the IO service. They seemed to think that they would do whatever they told them to do.
Foley’s was under the mistaken impression that all of the other divisions were using AdDirect.

The second trip was to Pittsburgh. I demonstrated the system to the advertising department of Kaufmann’s⁹, the May Company’s division that was based there. I was able to show the newspaper buyers on their own PCs that very little would be different when they began to use the A^xN code that had been added to the AdDept system with which they were familiar. It was really just a matter of flipping a switch for each paper. The system did the rest.

I then signed on to TSI’s AS/400 from one of their PC’s and showed them what orders would look like from their perspective. I showed them in the A^xN Handbook for Newspaper Users (posted here) what the orders looked like when the rep signed on with the newspaper’s credentials. They were very impressed.

After explaining how we planned to bill the newspapers, I asked Mary Ann Brown how difficult she thought that it would be to get the newspapers to cooperate. She said, “They’ll do whatever we tell them to do.”

I had appointments the next day with Pittsburgh’s two newspapers, the Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review. At the Trib I met with an IT guy. He found what we were doing very interesting. He verified that all the reps had access to the Internet, and he was quite pleased that our approach did not require him to purchase equipment or reconfigure what he had. The lady who was Kaufmann’s rep at the Post was more stand-offish, but she verified Mary Ann Brown’s assessment of their willingness to cooperate.

My third appointment was at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I rented a car and drove to Cleveland for an afternoon meeting with Kaufmann’s rep. I soon discovered that we had a common acquaintance. He had just returned from a trip to Albany. He had met there with Fran Lipari, the owner of Communication & Design¹⁰, the agency that handled the Key Bank account. The rep was polite, but he was not a bit enthusiastic about the prospect of paying TSI for handling insertion orders.

I rated my success level at the three newspapers as a win, a loss, and a tie. That was not a great result, but we were still in the ball game. We were just at the stage in which we were ready to roll the product out to the first advertiser when something remarkable happened.

In 2001 TSI received a telephone call from someone at Belk¹¹, a department store chain that was (and still is) based in Charlotte, NC. In the next few months I made many trips to Charlotte to discuss with them the use of the AdDept system. Since Belk already owned several AS/400s, the time between their approval of the AdDept contract with the accompanying design document for proposed enhancements and the beginning of the installation period was much shorter than usual. I remember that at one of those early meetings I was explaining how the AS/400 could automatically fax the insertion orders to the newspapers. Someone asked if it was possible to use the Internet to send the orders.

Guinea pigs love to whistle. Be careful; if you pick one up by its tail, its eyes will fall out.

I swear that I did not plant this question, but if I had thought of it ahead of time, I probably would have. I informed them that TSI had indeed developed just such a product, and we were about to roll it out to our existing customers. After I explained how it worked, Belk eagerly agreed to act as TSI’s guinea pig (sorry; I meant to type “Beta Site”) for A^xN. This was such an ideal situation that I could scarcely believe it.

How TSI persuaded nearly all of the users of AdDept and hundreds of newspapers to sign up for A^xN is explained in Part 2, which is posted here.

1. The name of the paper was changed to Springfield Republican in 2001.

2. Filene’s used AdDept for accounting functions, but only because the May Company insisted. I was never able to persuade the newspaper manager to abandon the elaborate set of spreadsheets that he had developed even though it did not produce insertion orders. The painful story of my attempts to get them to use more of the system have been chronicled here.

3. Most department stores negotiated much lower rates than the published ones. They often had complicated agreements about volume discounts.

4. The “standard rate” was the “open” rate for a black & white ROP ad in a daily edition. It did not include any discounts or premiums. I located a web page that actually included a page in one of the 2005 editions of Standard Rates and Data. It showed the complete rate card for the St. Petersburg Times, which happened to subscribe to A^xN. It is on p.3 of the pdf posted here. SRDS, the company that published the physical book, now allows subscribing advertisers and agencies to view the rates on the Internet.

5. TSI’s long relationship with Stage Stores is recounted here. I do not have vivid memories of Becky Newman. Her LinkedIn page is here.

6. Foley’s was one of the earliest users of AdDept. The details have been posted here.

7. I have only a vague recollection of AdDirect. Apparently it was a way of entering ads for insertion orders online one at a time. The orders could be sent to the newspapers. This might be a reasonable approach for an ad agency, but retailers ran the same ad in many markets. Entering these one at a time would be unduly burdensome. If the $10,000 figure is correct, then the AdDept-A^xN combination saved Stage a heck of a lot of money over the years.

8. M&F is Meier & Frank, the smallest department store division of the May Company. It was based in Portland, OR. Details of the AdDept installation at M&F have been posted here.

9. L&T refers to Lord & Taylor, the May Company division based in New York. The relationship between L&T and TSI is described here.

10. Much more has been posted about the AdDept installation at Kaufmann’s here.

11. Communication & Design (always “&”, never “and”) was one of the first ad agencies to purchase the GrandAd system. My adventures in installing and supporting that system are described here.

12. The details of TSI’s long and productive relationship with Belk are posted here.

2000 January TSI: Mike and Denise at PartnerWorld in San Diego

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Mike

Fun and frustration. Continue reading →

In the late nineties Denise and I had decided that we needed to investigate ways for TSI (or at least the two of us) to develop a new product or service and to modernize, if possible, our work on the AS/400. In late 1999 we learned about PartnerWorld, a convention for IBM’s business partners that was scheduled to be held in San Diego in late January of 2000. We decided to attend. Our objectives were two-fold: 1) to hear about IBM’s approach to the Internet; and 2) to meet other vendors with whom we might team up. I also bought two tickets for the San Diego Opera’s performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore on Tuesday, January 25. We decided to spend the last day at the zoo.

This must be in SD. Everyone in New England wears a coat in January.

On Sunday, January 23, Denise’s husband Ray drove her to Bradley International. I met them there and took a photo or two. Since we gained three hours en route we probably landed in San Diego in the afternoon. The airport was surprisingly close to Seaworld, Coronado Island, and downtown. I was accustomed to fairly long drives from airports to downtown locations. We boarded our rental car at Avis. The weather was fantastic throughout our stay.

I had booked rooms for us at the Best Western Inn by the sea in La Jolla, which was about a twenty-minute drive from the airport and the conference center. This was an excellent choice. It was a nice hotel that was reasonably priced and within walking distance of La Jolla cove. I seem to remember that Denise and I walked down to the beach as soon as we had gotten settled. There we saw both a beautiful stretch of sand and a large group of seals or maybe sea lions. Both species liked to hang around in the vicinity.

I found no notes about this trip. I found about ten photos that I took with disposable cameras. I must have had two and switched halfway through the trip; there are two different sizes of photos.

I bought a copy of Frommer’s guide to San Diego. I know that I used it to find the hotel because there was a business card marking the page for it. It said the prices were “moderate”, and they included a continental breakfast and free parking. A map was evidently torn out of the back of the book.

The business card was from Yvonne Carl, whose job was “Customer Advocate” at The 400 Group in Dedham, MA. By the time that I wrote this entry in 2023 I had no recollection of her or the group. When I tried its website, I was treated to a large and graphic ad for a combination flashlight and male sex toy.

The conference: On Monday we drove to the gigantic conference center and parked in the basement. When we registered we each received a faux leather black duffel bag, some printed materials, and an orange PartnerWorld tee shirt. Mine, for some reason had “Morpher” on the back. Denise’s had something equally meaningless.

The first event was the “kickoff” in a very large auditorium. I don’t know how many people were there, but the total attendance at the conference was about 4,000. Lou Gerstner, IBM’s celebrated Chairman, did not attend, but he sent a video. His message was that IBM was now all about e-business, by which he seemed to mean using the Internet directly or indirectly for commerce. IBM wanted everyone to use its servers and, more importantly, services. Another big emphasis was on the object-oriented programming called Java¹ and JavaBeans², both of which were developed by Sun Microsystems and licensed to everyone at no charge.

I remember two speakers. A lady who was in charge of marketing claimed that IBM “owned” the term e-business³. This was in reference to an advertising campaign that had associated IBM with the term. The other was Sam Palmisano, the number two guy at IBM, who must have thought that he was addressing the IBM sales force. He was very upset at EMC and Sun Microsystems, who were evidently using former IBM employees—of whom there were a large number—to undercut IBM on some accounts. He used the phrase “kick butts”, which seemed totally out of place for a gathering of people who had worked with IBM for years.

Denise and I usually split up to attend other presentations. In the only one that I remember a panelist said that in hiring you should always get the best person available. This was undoubtedly good advice, but I had learned that it was also crucial to find a way to keep them no matter what happened to your business.

We also visited some exhibits that were sponsored by third parties. At the time we were on the lookout for ways to provide a GUI⁴ front end for AdDept that we could implement without a great deal of work. We did not find anything of interest.

One of our major objectives was to make contact with people from other companies with which we could partner for mutual benefit. We were disappointed in this endeavor. IBM was not interested in helping its partners find partners. It wanted its partners to tell their customers to buy IBM computers and services.

Entertainment: I think that the comedian Sinbad performed on Monday evening. Denise and I attended. He began by telling the audience that he was a Mac guy. At the time Apple was not yet a major player in either servers or the Internet. Its computers were good for designers, but most people in business had little use for them. I was not very impressed with the rest of Sinbad’s routine either. I don’t think that he understood the nature of the audience.

On Tuesday evening we went to the San Diego Opera to see Il Trovatore. I remember being disappointed that the members of the orchestra did not take time to throw a baseball around during the overture. I also remember being very tired. In the last act I had to fight off drowsiness, and I was unable to prevent various Warner Bros. characters such as Sylvester and Bugs Bunny from appearing on the stage.

I remember that Denise and I were very impressed with the soprano who sang Leonora⁵. She rightly judged the arias to be beautiful. I also was surprised. I had listened to the opera several times and had never before been so impressed with these pieces.

On Wednesday Denise and I attended a party in the conference center. The music was supplied by what was left of the Beach Boys. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston were definitely there. Brian Wilson and Al Jardine were not. The other members of the band on the stage were much younger than Love and Johnston, who were both pushing sixty.

You won’t find any pictures of Mike Love without a hat. Bruce Johnston is on the left

There was nowhere to sit. Perhaps they expected people to dance, but this was a group of uber-geeks, predominantly male. Many may not have even heard of the Beach Boys. A few people may have danced, but I never would unless I had at least ten beers. I was at least nine short of that mark.

Two old guys singing about hot rods and surfing seemed weird in the twenty-first century. None of the magic of the performance that I witnessed at the concert at U-M (described here) remained.

Private experiences: I remember having two suppers with Denise. We went to a Mexican restaurant in Old Town one evening. I am pretty sure that we also went to a Chinese restaurant in La Jolla. I don’t remember where we ate lunches or breakfasts. Denise probably skipped some of these meals. When we ate together we almost exclusively discussed what we could do to enhance the business.

I don’t see any ear flaps. They must be seals.

We also spent some time walking up and down the beach and viewing the seals from a safe distance. The entire experience was at once exhilarating and disappointing. We were already starting to focus on using the Internet for insertion orders. We both had moderate confidence that we could make it work, and we were excited about the challenge. It was disheartening that we found nothing of value with regard to modernizing AS/400 applications.

The zoo: We spent the entire last day at the famous San Diego Zoo. We saw a very large number of animals, but the foliage used to establish the settings for the animals and the ambience of the zoo was nearly as stimulating.

I took dozens of photos with disposable cameras. This type of camera was totally inappropriate for a visit to the zoo. It had no ability to zoom or adjust the focus. They were not stored digitally. I had to take photos of the photos with my digital camera. That process lost some of the resolution. However, fuzzy memories are better than none.

I think that these photos are from our second visit to the panda exhibit. There are two photos from the first visit, too, but the panda is almost completely hidden by shrubbery.

The only fairly distinct memories that I have of the experience involved the panda exhibit. We began our visit there, and on that occasion we stood in line for a long time. When we finally got to the viewing area, the panda was very visible. We came back in the afternoon and got a better look.

We went to at least two shows. One of them involved birds that flew around but always returned to the trainer on command. The other featured a couple of big cats.

Here is a selection of the other photos in no particular order.

Two grouses. The dark one is facing left. The light one below it is facing right.

I don’t remember the trip back to Connecticut.

Epilogue: The result of TSI’s search for an Internet product was A^xN. The story of that project begins here. In the spring of 2006 Sue Comparetto and I returned to San Diego for a short vacation. That trip is described here.

1. I had read ten books on Java, and I did all of the exercises in each. I could do what they asked, but I could see no way to do most of what I wanted to do. On the AS/400 (and presumably on other machines as well) a Java Virtual Machine needed to be installed and configured. IBM put all of this stuff under the rubric of Websphere. The implementation on the AS/400 had horrendous performance compared to programs in the native environment.

2. JavaBeans are classes that encapsulate one or more objects into one standardized object (the bean). This standardization allows the beans to be handled in a more generic fashion, allowing easier reuse of code.

3. I liked to tell our clients that TSI was working on an Internet-based system for convents and monasteries. We planned to call it “Monk E-Business”.

4. GUI stands for “graphical user interface”, which means using screens that take advantage of all of the properties of personal computers. AdDept’s screens were still text-based, which made them less attractive but not necessarily less functional for the tasks that they performed. GUI front ends took advantage of the mouse and displayed information using colors, images, and such things as check boxes, radio buttons, text boxes, and pull-down windows.

5. We were right to be impressed. I discovered twenty-three and a half years after the fact that Leonora was played by Sondra Radvanovsky. At the time she was an up-and-coming star. Within a decade so she was an international diva recognized both for her singing and her acting ability. She gave several legendary performances at the Metropolitan Opera.

1999-2002 TSI: The Million Dollar Idea

Posted on August 30, 2021 by Mike

The genesis of AxN. Continue reading →

In large measure this entry is based on and inspired by a set of recently discovered messages that I sent to my partner, Denise Bessette, about new projects that we were researching or working on. The first email was dated in late 1999. The last was in early 2001. The messages portrayed an exciting but scary time for both of us.

By the middle of the nineties it was evident to us that the way that TSI had been programming in the past fifteen years was becoming obsolete or was at least losing popularity. In 1992 Microsoft left IBM at the starting gate when it released Windows 3.1, the first version of its operating system that featured a graphical user interface (GUI) and was also stable enough that large corporations took it seriously. One could still make the argument that text-based software systems like the ones that we had developed were appropriate for many business tasks—in fact, most of the most important ones. However, if you did, you were probably dooming yourself to the fate of typewriter salesmen.

In fact, systems like AdDept and TSI’s other systems were branded by many of the magazines of the day as “legacy systems”. The emphasis of the new approach centered around the appearance of the screens, which now featured colors, images, text boxes, radio buttons, and varied fonts. They were certainly more interesting to look at than anything that we had produced. The mouse was the thing! The keyboard was only used when absolutely necessary. Whether they were as efficient or as easy to use was debatable, but, as I already noted, we were well aware of what had happened to the typewriter salesmen.

Another thing that happened during the middle of the nineties was the explosive growth of the Internet. All software developers wanted to be a part of it, but few were exactly sure how to approach it. I knew that we needed to figure out what aspect we should concentrate on, but it was not an easy decision to make. A few early participants made a lot of money, but an awful lot of ideas were catastrophic failures.

The Search for a GUI: I spent countless hours researching ways that we could provide a GUI for the AdDept system that did not involve a complete rewriting of the hundreds (and growing daily) of screens that we had already implemented. Every developer who worked on IBM midrange or mainframe systems must have been faced with the same problem. We all wanted a way to provide a system that looked modern but also took advantage of the thousands of lines of functioning code that had already been written.

I don’t know why, but IBM was not much help in this endeavor. Instead, in the late nineties IBM became a strong proponent of an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems called Java. This was a startlingly new language. The first version was released in 1996.

I bought and read ten separate books that purported to teach Java programming. The structure of the language was consistent with the first principle of its design: “It must be simple, object-oriented, and familiar.” Well at least it was simple and object-oriented. The structure of the code was nothing like what I was accustomed to. Its main orientation was to a computer display, which it considered a set of objects, each with a set of properties and methods. That approached worked well enough for a screen, but how would it work for other things? After downloading the software development kit to my laptop and spending hundreds of hours mulling the contents of those books, I could do all of the exercises in every book, but I had not the slightest clue how to begin to code a system to manage any aspect of retail advertising. In fact I could not replicate even one screen of the AdDept system.

I did not completely discard the notion of using Java somehow, but if we did, we would definitely need some help. As I look back on this, maybe this is the reason why IBM was so crazy for Java.

The Spreadout Project: Users of TSI’s systems seldom complained about the look or feel of our data entry screens. Those screens would never have won any design awards, but the formats were completely consistent throughout the application, and everyone knew that they got the job done efficiently. Furthermore, they knew that TSI could implement requested changes rapidly and at moderate costs.

What they did not like much was the look of the reports, which was limited to one non-proportional font—Courier—with no images or even styles like italics or bolding. Many, if not most, of the people who used AdDept were quite good at making and manipulating spreadsheets. They were used to controlling the format of the output, and they liked the flexibility. For example, if they wanted someone to concentrate on one column or row, they could easily change the font, color, or style for just those cells.

Several clients asked us if it would be possible for us to produce an Excel spreadsheet as the output from designated programs in AdDept instead of or in addition to printed reports. I did not know if it would be possible, but I said that I would look into it. I dubbed this project “Spreadout”.

It was rather easy to produce an output file that contained the same rows and columns as the report, and we implemented that option in a large number of AdDept reports. The user could then download that file to their PC. That file could then be loaded into Excel with the rows and columns intact. However, the fields (or cells) in the file contained only text or numbers. It was not possible to download formulas for totaling or designate any kind of formatting. Furthermore, the process of downloading the file was not exactly speedy.

I tried to figure out what it would take to produce code that could provide files that could be opened in Excel with predetermined formulas and formatting. I found some documentation from Microsoft of the Excel files, but I never could concoct a way to provide what our customers asked for. Furthermore I never heard of anyone else who had accomplished this, and —believe me—I searched..

I did, however, managed to provide an alternative that proved popular to some clients. Almost all the AdDept customers used Hewlett-Packard printers that were accessible by the AS/400. HP sold books that documented the format for files in HP’s printer command languages, PCL 4, PCL 5, and PCL 6. I could then write code to produce spooled files that contained the output in exactly the format that the client specified. The downside was the considerable amount of coding required for each report, many times as much as it took to produce it in the Courier-only. It also required an extra step to send the output directly to the printer without being reformatted.

However, a few clients were so insistent about the need for a precise format that they were willing to pay the price. These reports were almost always the ones that they distributed to other departments or to higher-ups.

If anyone else ever did a project like this for the AS/400, I never heard of it. Unfortunately, I never figured out how it could be marketed as a stand-alone product usable with other AS/400 software.

As the new millennium approached, we—that is, Denise Bessette and I—felt that we needed to expand TSI’s horizons. In January of 2000 we flew to San Diego for IBM’s PartnerWorld conference in the hope of making contact with people who could advise us how to adapt to the need for modernization and the Internet. That enjoyable but frustrating experience has been described here.

On February 25, 2000, I took the time to write up in a fairly detailed manner how, given the inherent limitations of a small business like ours, TSI should to proceed in trying to develop a second line of business. Here is a portion of that memo:

General principles:
1. We should get the best people available to help us.
2. We should maintain AdDept as a dependable source of income. Whether we should invest a lot of time and/or money in enhancing and marketing AdDept is still to be determined.
3. We should try to leverage our assets better. Our income is too heavily dependent upon the number of hours put in by Mike and Denise.
4. We should assume that the economy will remain strong for another two years. On the other hand, we should avoid debt or at least large amounts of debt in case this assumption turns out to be false.
5. We should add new skills that are more marketable. That means learning some subset of Windows, object-oriented programming, and the internet. We should be thinking past the next project to the one after that if we can.
6. We should look for partners with skills and assets that complement ours.
7. We should not be deterred by the fact that some of these principles seem incompatible.
8. We need to act fast. Pursuing René² cost us seven months. On the other hand we might have gone down some less profitable paths if she had been on board.
I think we should take the following steps as soon as possible.
1. Find out what it takes to get our existing clients to use AdDept for insertion orders. The following clients are not using AdDept for IO’s: Macy’s East, Neiman Marcus, Filene’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Hecht’s. I checked Herberger’s. They have ads through March 29, 2000, at least. Macy’s West is apparently starting. Gottschalks ran insertion orders yesterday. I don’t know about Meier & Frank, but I can take care of that on my trip.
2. Find out which advertising departments have access to the internet and would be willing to use it to check on insertion orders. I don’t think that this would be a problem with most of them. Unfortunately, we don’t really have anyone in the office who can do this for us.
3. Make an appointment with Ken Owen³ to run the idea of a clearinghouse for insertion orders by him. He may be very interested in working with us on it. I have quite a bit of respect for him. At the very least, he is smart and completely honest.
4. Run the clearinghouse idea by at least one of our clients. Why not schedule our trip to New York and run it by Tom, Chris, and whoever their ROP person is?⁴
5. Run the clearinghouse idea by at least one newspaper or someone who knows how newspapers think about these things today.
6. Start trying to package and market AdDept and/or AS/400 products and services. We need to maintain or enhance our cash position over the next six months.
7. We should find out what, if anything, the National Newspaper Association (NNA)⁵, the AAAA⁶, and AP AdSEND have done in this regard. The AP is a potential partner in this venture. I once had a copy of the NNA’s EDI spec⁷, but I seem to have thrown it out when we moved. I will see what I can find on the Internet.
Requirements for hiring a marketing/client services person:
1. He/she must be able to get along with Mike and Denise. This includes having a good work ethic. I think Doug barely met these qualifications.
2. Must be able to get along with the clients.
3. Must be willing to spend a lot of time on the phone.
4. Must be able to talk to decision-makers and occasionally presidents of corporations without looking foolish. Doug could do this, but his ability to identify the real decision-maker was just so-so. He was also almost always overly optimistic, but this might be necessary to offset my tendency to see the negative side of everything.
5. Must be able to refrain from overselling.
Pluses:
1. Intelligence. Determination can go a long way to overcome deficiencies in this categories, but I don’t think I want to try to explain things to someone any duller than Doug.
2. Retail experience.
3. Newspaper experience.
4. Other advertising experience.
5. Good business sense.
6. Sales experience.
7. Computer experience.
How to proceed.
1. We can run an ad in the Courant. There are almost as many classified ads for sales and marketing people there as for programmers. The only major retailer in the immediate area now is Ames, and they run no ROP. Therefore the chances of finding someone in Hartford who understands retail advertising are slim.
2. We can contact a headhunter. We don’t have to pay unless we find someone, but we will have to pay plenty if we do. It might be worth it if it speeds up the process.
3. We can advertise on the Internet. Does that cost money? If so, how much?
4. In interviews I think that we should consider dangling a carrot of a spinoff of a .com company for the insertion order clearinghouse. I am not exactly sure how to present this idea to someone. Maybe we could offer them a percentage of the new company with the understanding that we would try to sell it once it has become established.

In retrospective I find it impressive that I was able to earmark in advance so many important issues that TSI would face over the next few years. We made some mistakes, but we made a lot of good decisions.

A month later, on March 25, 2000, I mailed a letter to our contacts at all of the companies that used AdDept. I solicited their opinions on what TSI’s priorities should be in the new millennium. Here is a copy:

TSI is in the process of evaluating how best to allocate its resources over the course of the next year or so. Our highest priorities will remain providing excellent support for existing installations and responding to requests for custom programming from existing clients. However, there are a few additional projects that we are considering. We are very interested in learning what our existing clients think about them.
1. Menu maker: This is a fairly simple idea both in concept and in implementation. You would be provided with either a PC/Mac program or an AS/400 program that would allow you to create your own menus. The menus would reside in a separate library so that they would never get mixed up with the standard AdDept menus. You would provide the name for the menu and the heading text. For each option you that want to add, you would be allowed to select from a list of AdDept programs and menus. You could also enter your own command or an IBM command (e.g., WRKQRY). If you selected an AdDept menu or program, the description and the online help would be filled in for you, but you could override the text to make it say what you wanted.
2. GUI front end: Most software companies that market systems of a size comparable to AdDept have budgeted more than $1 million to “modernizing” their data entry screens to use a “graphical user interface” that is consistent with the methods used by Windows and Mac programs. It is now technically feasible to create a fairly nice GUI front end for AdDept for much less than that using products available from third party vendors. However, there is still a considerable capital outlay involved. We also estimate that it would take at least half of a man-year of labor. Furthermore, the PC or Mac would have to meet certain minimum requirements. Terminals would still use the green screens. TSI’s support regimen would be more difficult. The interactive programs would probably run slower on older AS/400’s. They may actually run faster on newer boxes.
3. Output to Excel: We believe that it is technically feasible (albeit difficult) to create a file from the AS/400 that is usable by Microsoft Excel with no intervening steps. It is a relatively straightforward task to download data files (or even spooled files) to spreadsheets today, but many intervening steps are required to get something presentable. TSI’s proposed method would allow you for each report that is eligible for this kind of treatment to designate (and permanently store) the formatting of the worksheet—report titles, column headings, “fit to page”, and most of the other values in “File, Page Setup.” You would also be allowed to designate fonts and sizes for the report title, the column headings, the body text, and each level of subtotals. The subtotal values would be formulas, not simple values. The same program could be used for data files that are produced by queries. The resulting worksheet could then be edited as needed. You can even edit, add, or delete lines in the worksheet. The subtotals will automatically be updated. Most simple reports could be reformatted to use the proposed program. It might be difficult or even impossible to generate some complex AdDept output using this approach.
4. Insertion order clearinghouse: We have long thought that the methods used for reserving newspaper space leave too much room for error and are overly labor-intensive, both for the advertiser and for the newspaper. The purpose of this project is to make the ordering process easier and to minimize the potential for miscommunication.
Instead of faxing the orders, the AS/400 would send them electronically to TSI. We would post them on a website. When the newspaper reps sign on, they would see all orders for them from all advertisers who are using this service. They would be able to add comments or questions and confirm them electronically with or without reservation numbers. They could also print the orders and, eventually, download them directly into their reservation systems. When you sign on, you would see all of your orders. It will be immediately obvious which ones have been confirmed, which have been read but not confirmed, and which have not been read yet.
What do you think of these ideas? Do you have any ideas of your own? We would greatly appreciate it if you would communicate your feedback to us at your earliest convenience. The last thing that we want to do is invest a lot of time and money in something that is of little or no perceived value to our clients.

I don’t recall receiving any substantive responses to this, but around this time Steve VeZain sent me a rather lengthy email that explained some of the priorities for Saks Inc. Our dealings with him and his company are detailed here.

Net.Data: At some point I became acquainted with an online forum called IGNITe/400⁷. This was a website where AS/400 developers could pose questions about using the AS/400 for applications for the web. Although some IBM experts participated, the forum was not run by IBM, but by a former IBMer named Bob Cancilla⁸, who worked for a company in Rochester, MN, the home of the AS/400.

Bob also wrote the book shown at left that explained how to use the AS/400 as an Internet server. IBM disdained the approach of its customers using a book written by someone who had actually gotten the AS/400 to function as an Internet server. Big Blue preferred that its customers spend hundreds of dollars on classes or thousands of dollars on consultants rather than $15 or $20 for a book. They also championed something called WebSphere to manage applications written in Java. During February and March of 2000 I had puzzled over the Redbook that documented this product. I was nearly ready to give up on the idea of using the AS/400 for anything related to the Internet until I found Bob’s book and website in April of 2000.

I purchased this excellent tome and followed most of Bob’s advice. I successfully configured TSI’s model 150 as an HTTP server to serve web pages to browsers and as an FTP server for exchanging data files. It was possible to use the AS/400 as an email server, but Bob advised against it. We elected to use AT&T for sending and receiving emails for our employees. We later configured our AS/400 to send outgoing emails through the SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) server. Eventually IBM decided that it was a bad idea to have its own proprietary HTTP server and supported a version of the Apache server used by almost everyone else.

At that time the most popular scripting language for web-based applications was PERL. IBM never supported it on the AS/400⁹. Instead it provided its own language, which was called Net.Data (pronounced “Net Dot Data”). This was the only web language that could be used on the AS/400, and no other system in the history of the world ever used it. We obtained a copy of IBM’s handbook on Net.Data (posted online here), and I determined that we could probably use the language for what we wanted to do. Here is what I wrote about it at the time.

I signed on to the IGNITe400 website and registered as a member. It’s free. You can ask questions there. I looked at a few of them. Bob Cancilla himself answered some of the questions! I also looked at IBM’s Net.Data website. It is full of information.
I printed out a lot of documentation. I am now convinced that we can do what we want to do with HTTP server and Net.Data. This is exciting. Buying that book was a great idea. The links alone are worth the price. The biggest difficulty that I see will be working out the process of getting the orders from our customers and then from others.
… I have more than doubled my knowledge about the AS/400 and the internet in the last two days. Moreover, I think I could do it! I think that we should try it some time this coming week.

Net.Data was an interpreted language, just as BASIC was on the Datamaster and the System/36. The programs (which in web parlance were called scripts or macros) were not compiled into executable machine code. Changes to the scrips took effect as soon as the programmer made them. So, a developmental environment was a necessity. The time it took the processor to interpret the code and generate the HTML code that the browser could understand made all of the programs considerably slower than the compiled BASIC programs on the same machine. However, they were lightning fast compared to Java, the approach blessed by IBM.

So, I taught myself how to use Net.Data to deliver interactive scripts for a browser (at the time the main choices were Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and whatever Apple called its browser before Safari). The language itself was relatively easy to understand, but programming for numerous constantly changing browsers was much different from programming for a very stable AS/400 and its 5250 user interface.

I also had to learn the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), which was the method of reading from and writing to files on the AS/400. This was totally different from what we were accustomed to. Our programs had always read the files a record at a time even after we switched to the AS/400’s relational database. With Net.Data it was necessary to execute an SQL statement that returned a set of data—rows (records) and columns (fields)—that was stored in an array (called a table in Net.Data). It was then necessary to loop through the rows of the array. I was already somewhat familiar with SQL, but I needed to learn how to use “joins” to do complicated selections.

These two volumes got a workout. The binding on the HTML book split in two years ago.

I also needed to buy books on HTML and JavaScript. If I had realized before I started that I needed to learn all of this, I might have deemed that the project would require more time and effort than I could afford. However, by the time that I realized what I was up against, I had invested so much time that I was not about to abandon the project.

There was no syntax-checking of Net.Data macros, and, at first, there was no editor to help by color-coding the statements. So, when I ran into a problem, which happened quite frequently, I had to search elsewhere for help.

Life got a lot easier when IBM put its Redbooks on CDs.

In researching for this blog, I found a pdf online for a Redbook (technical manual) that IBM published for people like me in 1997. It is posted here. Even a quick glance will make it clear that writing applications for the AS/400’s HTTP server would be a daunting task. For example, it contained this statement: “Net.Data Web macros combine things you already know such as HTML, SQL, and REXX with a simple macro language.” I did not know HTML at all, I knew only a little SQL, and to this day I have no idea what REXX was. Also, the Redbook neglected to mention that it was not really possible to write interactive programs without JavaScript.

I hung in there. Here is one of my last messages: “I feel a lot of pressure to work harder. I want this new project operational yesterday. It is going to be difficult at first. I want to get over the hump.”

I spent a lot of time in the IGNITe/400 forum. My best source of information was a guy from (I think) New Zealand, of all places. I never met him in person or even spoke with him on the phone. His name was Peter Connell, and he helped me through every difficult coding problem that I encountered. Not once was he stumped. By the time that I was well into the project, I was able to provide solutions to coding problems that others described.

TSI’s Internet Project: Even before Denise and I attended PartnerWorld, we had pretty much decided that our best shot at developing a successful Internet product would involve insertion orders, which is what newspapers and magazine call reservations that they receive from advertisers for ROP (display ads), inserts, polybags, or any other kind of advertising. TSI’s AdDept customers sent their reps at newspapers a schedule that listed all of the ads that they wanted to place for a specified period—usually a week. Most of them faxed this information to the papers. The rep at the paper examined the schedule. Sometimes questions required phone calls. Sometimes requests (such as designated positioning in the paper) could not be accommodated. Even after final approval the schedule was often changed by the advertiser before the ads ran, sometimes with very little advance notification.

Newspaper ads were expensive … and valuable.

Errors on both sides were not rare, and they could be quite costly. The newspaper often gave the retailer free ads to make up for the mistake. The advertiser’s loss might be much greater. In the nineties and early twenty-first century ads in newspapers were the primary vehicle for communicating with customers. Mistakes in the ads could cost the retailer thousands in sales, and they were embarrassing to the advertising department. Occasionally heads rolled.

In 2000 most retail advertisers faxed their schedules to the newspapers. If the line was not busy, the phones were rather reliable. However, what happened to the schedule after the fax machine received it? Was the printout legible? Did the rep ever get it, and, if so, what did he/she do with it. What assurance was there that the fax that the newspaper used to compose the paper was the final version?

We thought that the Internet might provide an opportunity to speed up this process and to improve its reliability. My first idea was to replace faxing with email. If the AS/400’s (free) SMTP server were installed, AdDept could compose and send to the newspaper an email that contained the schedule. Wouldn’t the newspaper rep immediately print the schedule? If so, how was this better than faxing? Doesn’t it just add another step? Besides, email is demonstrably less reliable than faxing. The worst that usually happens with faxing is that the output is blurry or even unreadable. Emails, in contrast, can be held up by any Internet Service Provider (ISP) that handles the message, and there could be dozens. So, the schedule might never make it to the rep’s inbox.

Eventually Denise and I settled on using FTP to send the schedule from the client’s AdDept system to TSI. Thereafter TSI’s AS/400 managed the whole process using a combination of BASIC programs and Net.Data macros. Details of the actual design are posted here.

After Denise and I agreed on the design, several details still needed to be settled:

Who will do the coding at TSI?
Who will pay for the service, the advertiser or the newspaper?
How much will we charge?
How will we market the product to our clients and their newspapers?
How can we entice advertisers that did not use AdDept to use this method for insertion orders?
Can we take advantage of the link established between TSI, the papers, and AdDept for other modules?
What will the product be named?
Will the project be part of TSI or a new financial entity?

The answer to #1 turned out to be Mike Wavada. I expected that I would eventually train Denise or one of the programmers so that they could at least support the existing code, but it never happened. It astounds me to report that this was a one-man coding job from day one, and no one else at TSI ever learned Net.Data. Hundreds of papers and most of the AdDept clients relied on it starting in 2002 and continuing through early 2014. Think about this: Between 2003 and 2012 I took six vacations in Europe and one cruise in the Caribbean. There were no serious incidents!

Questions 2-5 are addressed in the entry about marketing of A^xN, which is posted here.

From the outset I was hoping that the nexus connecting newspapers and the retailers through TSI’s website could be used for other communications as well. The most obvious one was for the delivery of the files that contained the layouts of the ads. Nevertheless, I was reluctant to pursue this for several very good reasons. The first was that the Associated Press already had a huge head start with its very popular product called AdSEND¹⁰. There were also several other companies that offered similar services.

The other thing that gave me pause was the potential legal liability. It seemed to me that if we failed to deliver an ad correctly and/or promptly, we could easily be sued. A fundamental tenet of TSI’s operation had been to avoid any activity that might occasion a lawsuit. Throughout the first two decades of its operation, TSI had successfully avoided litigation. Also, we knew nothing about the process of sending ads electronically, and the AP already owned satellites that it used for this purpose. I also learned later that AdSEND had twelve dedicated T-1 lines, and one of TSI’s clients told me that that was not nearly enough. TSI eventually installed one T-1 line that easily handled the insertion order traffic generated by A^xN.

An idea that I liked better was for the newspapers to transmit their invoices electronically through TSI’s servers to AdDept users. I even came up with a cool name for this: e-I-e-IO, which stood for electronic invoices and electronic insertion orders. My idea was to provide a program to feed the newspaper’s billing system with the information from the insertion order, and to feed the retailer’s AdDept system with the same information. I did a little research to see if one software system for billing or accounting was dominant in the newspaper industry and discovered that this was decidedly not the case. So, we would face the prospect of persuading one paper at a time, or, at best, one chain of papers at a time. Furthermore, someone else had already claimed the URL that I really wanted: eieio.com.

The name that I picked for the new product would still work if we came up with other ways for TSI to serve as a nexus between advertisers (A) and newspapers (N). It was A^xN, which was pronounced “A cross N”. The A and the N were always portrayed in dark blue Times New Roman. The x was always in red Arial.

That leaves question #8. Denise was always in favor of making A^xN a separate financial entity. However, we never found a way to extricate it from the rest of the business. We looked at the revenues separately, but we never even did a separate P&L for it.

1. René Conrad was TSI’s liaison with Kaufmann’s, the May Company’s division based in Pittsburgh. Both Denise and I had a very high opinion of her. When Doug Pease left TSI in 1999, we tried to hire René. Details of the AdDept installation at Kaufman’s are posted here. The unsuccessful pursuit of René is documented here.

2. Ken Owen is a friend and was a client. The latter role is explained here. By 1999 Ken’s business had drifted away from creating and placing ads for clients to software for the Internet. He gave us a little free advice, but the role for him that I envisioned did not materialize. I communicate via email with Ken every year on March 4, the holiday that we celebrate together—Exelauno Day.

3. Tom Caputo and Chris Pease were our key contacts at Lord & Taylor in Manhattan in those days. The history of the installation at L&T is recorded here.

4. I did contact the NNA, but nothing came of it. The person with whom I spoke was nice enough, but it became evident that trying to work with this organization would be extremely time-consuming and not the kind of thing that I was good at or enjoyed. Eventually I discovered that there were almost as many administrative systems for newspapers as there were newspapers. It appeared that there were no accepted standards.

5. The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA—universally pronounced “four A’s”) published an annual list of software for ad agencies. For years TSI’s GrandAd system was on the list. I am not sure what I had in mind as an additional relationship. Perhaps I envisioned ad agencies that specialized in retailers might want to use A^xN for insertion orders and would work with us to create an interface. Perhaps I thought that other software companies might add the interface to their products for ad agencies. Nothing like any of these things ever happened.

6. EDI is short for Electronic Data Interchange. It refers to an orderly setup that enables participant to exchange information electronically. When there are only two participants, it is usually just called an interface. “Specs”, which is short for specifications, refers to the documentation published and delivered to the participants and prospective participants.

7. I have no idea what the name of this group meant. At the time IBM was busy promoting the idea of e-business. IBM’s marketing director proclaimed at PartnerWorld that IBM “owned” the concept. So, that may explain why the e is not capitalized. I was surprised to find an article in Enterprise Systems Journal about IGNITe/400. It is posted here.

8. Bob Cancilla went back to IBM for a while and then became a consultant. His LinkedIn page is here. In 2018 he wrote about the thirtieth anniversary of the AS/400. It is posted here. The article explains some of the reasons why IBM treated the AS/400 division and its customers so shabbily almost from day one.

9. For some reason IBM repeatedly changed the name of the AS/400 to a bunch of things with the letter i appended. The operating system remained the same. Everyone at TSI, like most users, still called it the AS/400 even after the name changes.

10. In 2007 Vio Worldwide acquired “the assets” of AdSEND. The deal is described here. In 2010 Dubsat acquired Vio Worldwide. This transaction was reported here.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: AxN

2002-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Belk

1997-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: The Bon-Ton

2000-2001 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 1

2000 January TSI: Mike and Denise at PartnerWorld in San Diego

1999-2002 TSI: The Million Dollar Idea