2005-2009 TSI: AdDept Client: Macy’s South

Posted on August 30, 2021 by Mike

The last AdDept client. Continue reading →

By the time contract had been signed. and we had started the installation, Macy’s Inc. had officially renamed its division based in Atlanta from Macy’s South (MSO) to Macy’s Central. This was done to reflect the fact that that division was scheduled to absorb most of the stores from Hecht’s and Foley’s after the big acquisition of stores from the May Co. However, I never heard anyone at TSI or at Macy’s refer to the people in Atlanta as Macy’s Central. Only New Yorkers could think of Atlanta as being central.

I cannot prove it, but I am pretty sure that TSI won the MSO account because of the efforts of Beverly Ingraham and the other other employees in Foley’s advertising department (introduced here). I know for a fact that people from the advertising department at MSO had made a trip to Houston to investigate the AdDept system there. They came away very impressed with what the system had allowed them to accomplished. The strong relationship between the department’s employees and TSI over a period for more than a dozen years was a point of emphasis.

The advertising people at MSO had been struggling to use an outdated version of FedAd named Assets.¹ It was no longer supported by the development team, and no one thought that it could handle the increased load of two new divisions. The FedAd developers also had warned the seven (!) advertising planners that they would not be able to produce software that would allow them to plan in the way that they did. Several areas of MSO’s advertising department had developed PC systems to handle their tasks. The one used for direct mail was quite sophisticated, but it was also unsupported and undocumented.

I learned about MSO’s interest in a phone call from Aurore Murphy², the Advertising Director, in November of 2005. She told me that the decision to use AdDept had already been made and that the hardware was being arranged. She asked me to come to Atlanta to talk with them about what changes would be needed to make AdDept work for them.

I could hardly believe my ears. No sale was ever this easy, and this was a division of Federated/Macy’s! I asked Eileen Sheehan-Willett (introduced here), TSI’s administrative person, to book me on a Delta flight to Atlanta for November 29. Aurore advised me to take a MARTA train from the airport to the Buckhead area. She insisted that I stay at the Marriott Courtyard that was near their office. For three days I met with people in every area of the department. It was probably the most productive trip of my entire career. Everyone was prepared to talk with me.

Note: This blog entry contains much more detailed information about the installation than the entries for most other clients. I discovered a large number of very detailed and complete notes as well as many other documents. I thought that it would be a good idea to give a feel for the scope and difficulty of the work that TSI did for its clients during the installation of the AdDept system to assure that it performed to the client’s satisfaction.

The first trip: Here are excerpts from my notes:

Some things are done in a system named Aims. ROP (and maybe something else) is done in Assets. Many things are done on spreadsheets. They use one six-digit system of “ad numbers” for ROP. They use a different system of job numbers for other media. The latter start with a three digit event code. They said that they would not mind changing numbering systems.
The reassignment of stores will take place on a staggered basis over the next nine months. This will be very confusing.
The Home Division does not place any ads. However, they do handle the co-op and production of the pages for home merchandise. They then transfer these transactions to the retail divisions. The people at Macy’s South seemed to think that this is a mistake.
Federated determines their merchandise department numbers. All divisions use the same numbers.

My first meeting was with Cliff Webber³ and Beth Lane⁴, the pair who ran the Advertising Business Office. It lasted almost four hours. I reported that “They gave me every report that they use for closing. Nothing seemed insuperably difficult.” The list of issues that I brought back to Connecticut was too long to include here.

My second stop was in planning:

I met with Steve Weinbaum⁵ for a couple of hours. He now works in another area, but he was the planning manager for years, and he is the one who knows how their system works. The person who does this job now is named Miriam Pechar⁶.

It is hard to believe, but they primarily use seven different spreadsheets, one for each GMM. Each ad is on each spreadsheet!
They want output files for all of their reports.
I think that they will work with status P ads. When the plan is approved, the ads will be changed to A and handed over to the appropriate media manager.
They supply data for database marketing. Lots of new fields.

I then spent a half hour with Laurie Stenwall⁷, the Database Marketing Manager. She said that she would like to be able to get the information that they need to schedule a piece from AdDept. Most of that information is from the ad planners.

I likewise spent thirty minutes with Karla Schottle⁸, Advertising Effectiveness Manager. She and her group analyze the costs by event, merchant, and market. She would probably love it if she had access to DAPANDL, DACOMMD, DAACTST, and DACOMMST, the files created by the cost accounting programs. One troublesome issue popped up:

I think that we may finally have to address the polybag problem, namely how do we handle it when the project involves a polybag that contains a book with stitch-ins and blow-ins and several other pieces.

I met with Jeanna Corley⁹, the Production Manager, for about an hour. Nothing that she showed me seemed that difficult.

My meeting with Andrea Harrison¹⁰, the Traffic Manager, was a short one. She was not on the original schedule. She showed me how she kept track of the progress of production jobs. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Only two issues emerged:

They would like a project list for each team. Do we still have a way of specifying the creative/production team for each ad?
They sometimes have swing pages for merchandise, but it does not seem to be necessary to keep track of this in AdDept.

The two-hour meeting about newspaper advertising involved Karen Martin¹¹, Vice President of Advertising, Annemarie Poterba¹², the ROP Manager, and Bill McFadden¹³, a Media Planner. It lasted for a couple of hours. Here is what I wrote:

They are very backward in this area. They do not even send insertion orders; they just print a schedule and send it to all of the papers! They were overwhelmed by what we could do for them, especially with A^XN. The only slightly challenging thing will be in the area of competitive lineage, which they enter in as a summary number for each competitor-newspaper combination.

Here were some of the issues in the newspaper area:

They need to show what markets the ads run in. Their schedules use a mishmash of methods – lists of market groups like Stage’s, checkmarks, and names of individual papers. I think that they might like something like Foley’s schedule.
They would like a method of getting a list of the papers that have actually received the inserts from their printers. Maybe we could give them a checkbox field in A^XN so that they could confirm each one when it arrives. Then the unchecked ones could be reminded with the nightly update program.
We may need to do some work to provide them with a change report that is as easy to read as the one that they currently use.
They have a This Year-Last Year report by day that might be a little challenging. We will have to provide them with a substitute for the shading that they use to flag the sections for last year.
They use one ad per page for sections. Is this our recommended method?
They said that they might be interested in entering completed dates for ROP. They said that Foley’s told them that their creative people enter completion dates in ROP.
They have a separate ad number for each version, but they were amenable to using version codes instead.

“Stage’s” refers to Stage Stores, a large chain of stores that was also based in Houston. The AdDept installation there has been described here.

My last major meeting, with Gretchen Watkins¹⁴, the Direct Mail Manager, was different from the others:

This was the only disconcerting part of the trip. She uses a very sophisticated FileMaker Pro system that was developed by her predecessor. It has an unbelievable number of functions in it. The guy who developed it used it for every single aspect of his job, including calculating postage and approving invoices. However, I don’t think that replacing this system needs to be part of phase 1 of this project.

Of course the developer mentioned above no longer supported the program that he used, and there was no documentation.

I flew back to Connecticut with a spiral notebook full of notes, a briefcase full of sample reports, and a list of telephone numbers of everyone in the department. It was late on Friday evening when I arrived, but I was back in the office on Saturday morning to work on the Design Document.

I found a copy of the original Design Document and a supplement that covered new planning projects. Unfortunately, they are in PageMaker format, and I no longer have any software that can open them.

December 12-14, 2005: Within two weeks I was back in Atlanta. This time—and on all subsequent trips—I stayed at a Hampton Inn in Buckhead. It was about a mile south of the MSO headquarters, but I was still in good shape in those days, and I did not mind the walk. The weather was much more pleasant than it would have been in New England.

What I did mind was the inconvenience when nature called while I was in the advertising department. The bathrooms in the building were in the elevator area. To get from the elevator area to the offices you needed a badge. I didn’t have one.

By this time the department was connected to an AS/400 owned by Federated that was located at an IBM installation in Raleigh, NC. It was managed by IBM employees in Raleigh. The first thing on my agenda was to give a data entry class to about ten people in a small theater set up for training classes. I gave each of them the book that explained how the screens worked, and the conventions used in AdDept.

I spent most of the rest of the day setting up the AdDept system for them. For the most part I used the settings from Macy’s West’s version, which was on the same box. Using data files that MSO provided I was able to populate a few of the tables in the MSO AdDept system: regions, pubs, rates, vendors, and G/L accounts.

The PC that I used was very slow, and every so often it would go into an interminable stall while a program on the company’s intranet scanned it for malware.

On Tuesday James Jordan, the network guy in MSO’s advertising department, and I sat in on a conference call with Dan Stackhouse from Macy’s West (introduced here) and several people from IBM. Fran Ponder managed Federated’s account. Harry Burnett was in charge of things from a sales angle. Anthony Berry was in charge of security. Steve Tesch and Richard Antle are the technical support people. I never met any of them, but at least the mystery of where the AS/400 resided was cleared up.

Amy Diehl. For the first time I had a tiny point-and-shoot digital camera made by Cascio. I had only a vague idea how to use it.

Amy Diehl, whose title is FedAd Manager and who was the liaison with TSI, told me that she planned to enter ads the following week. She would be on vacation the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Amy could not believe how fast ads can be entered in AdDept. She told me that entry of one ad in Assets required 172 mouse clicks.

When I left to return to Connecticut the AdDept system was usable, but there were still major glitches that I could not address. For example, neither user profiles nor output queues had been created. So, one employee could use the training user ID to sign on, but there was no way even to print.

It was still unclear as to when they would be allowed them to create these. As always, there was a freeze on programming at this time of year. They were reluctant to do anything. Aurore said that she would address this.

I noticed that Macy’s West’s DAPANDL file had an enormous number of deleted records. I wrote to Denise that itshould be changed to reuse deleted records. The deleted records should be removed to recover disk space. Since there is a freeze on changes, we need to get the project of removing the deleted records approved by the change committee. I sent myself a reminder message to work with Dan on this when I got home.

A few small problems were discovered, but so far so good.

January 10-12, 2006 trip: I wanted to get the ROP portion of the system working. It was always important to show positive results quickly, and I could usually accomplish that in ROP. My notes reported that I addressed many little things, including some problems with the way that IBM had set up the system:

I had to start the batch subsystem.
We created a pub group with the first four pubs. We then ran the ROP schedule for the one day that Amy had entered.
We created day-of-the-week rates for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
I conducted a short query class with Amy and Jeanna.
I created three libraries for them: S_QRY, S_OUTFILE, and S_UPLOAD.
Bernice Bailey¹⁶, who works with Cliff, sent me the layouts for the upload to expense payables and to the general ledger.
There are two output queues, MCAP0314 and MCAP0315. They seem to work. However, Amy’s user profile was associated with an output queue in California. James got Fran Ponder from IBM to fix the existing profiles.
They have negotiated with several papers that a limited number of full color full page ads get a special rate. I showed Amy how to set up special rate codes for these, D/xx, S/xx, etc. I also showed the ROP people, but the planning people, whom I have yet to talk with, are the ones who actually do this.
Bernice Bailey sent me a file with the entire hierarchy. I wrote a program to create the five hierarchy file and the department file. They are using descriptions, not people’s names. I also created a 999 entry in all five files for Storewide, which is the default department.
I turned off the feature of change management for positions.
I set up their stores using codes that were identical to their market codes.
I ran contract reports using Macy’s West data, and I showed it to Annemarie and Bill. They thought that the reports would really be useful.
I showed the insertion order process to Annemarie and Bill. I also showed them how to create boilerplate for the special instructions.
I showed the A^XN letter to Annemarie and Bill. I told them what we needed from them to get the process going. They were very interested, but it is nearly impossible to get them to commit to anything.

When I returned to Connecticut there were still a number of things that IBM had not addressed:

Only two user profiles have been created.
Someone needs to change the startup program to restart the S_BATCH and S_INTER subsystems.
They do not have their own job description, but I don’t know whether they actually need one.

Of course, there were also eleven action items for TSI, and the most stressful period was yet to come. January was the last month of the fiscal year, and I had been challenged to match their closing numbers for January in order to feel comfortable closing February, the first fiscal month.

February 13-16, 2006, Trip: Things were still rather shaky in Buckhead:

Cliff did not know his password for the AS/400. I reset it for him. I had to do this for one other user as well.
It took a long time, but we finally figured out the ROP accrual for January. They underaccrued by a staggering amount. I put all the ROP discrepancies in ad #052-1. They will probably need to split the items on this ad. I doubt that they will want to take all of this expense in one month.
I had a Vietnam flashback on Tuesday. The PC that I was using suddenly turned into a Mac. Seriously. Evidently the monitor and keyboard were connected to some kind of switching device which was connected to a Mac as well as the PC. If you pressed the right Ctrl key twice, you toggled over to the Mac.
Thursday afternoon was rushed, but I did manage to show Cliff and Amy how to record purchase orders both ways and how to record both media and production invoices. I thought that it would be easy to record the first media invoice from the Cincinnati Enquirer, but the ads for the first week in February had not been checked. So we had to bail out of it.

I need to explain the “underaccrued” paragraph above. I worked with Jackie Foulds¹⁷ to find the problem.

The “ROP accrual” was for ads that had run but for which no invoice had yet been received. Since nearly all newspapers billed by the month, the list included nearly all ads for January. Accrual accounting demanded that the expenses be incurred in January. On this occasion the list included all of the correct numbers for each newspaper, but it was in Excel, and the total as defined on the spreadsheet somehow did not include the Atlanta Journal-Inquirer, MSO’s largest paper. So, their accrual entry had been off by over $600,000, and no one had noticed! It took Jackie and me nearly an entire day to find this error because I expected the devil to be in the details.

I was gobsmacked when I found this. The fiscal year had been closed, at least in theory. The department had reported far less expenses than it had actually incurred. That meant that the expense would hit in the wrong fiscal year, which could be disastrous for the department’s budgeting. Since no one seemed to be too upset about this, there must have been a way to correct the accrual.

Only eight items were on the to-do list that I brought back to Connecticut.

March 13-16, 2006, trip: This trip focused on insertion orders, claims (charging co-op vendors), and reconciling the February closing. Here are notes:

I had to give Cliff a new password. He forgot the one that I gave him the last time that I was there. I had to do this for several other people, too.
Amy and I met with Bill and Marie. They have a sour attitude about the whole project. I am not sure why they are so in love with the system that they have. It is not very good.
I created a program DM220RMSX for them based on Foley’s insertion order program. I expanded the headline to 30 characters and made a few other small changes. I ran a sample to show Bill and Marie from the newspaper area. I can’t say that they were very impressed. They do not seem to be able to imagine how this will work.
I gave a class on entering claims. The ladies entered all of the claims for February. I ran one of the programs on SSIMONTH so that they could have a list of what they keyed in. If there is a better program for this, we should put it on the MSABO menu.
We reconciled the accruals for almost all of the papers. There were a lot of mistakes, but the discrepancy was not as large as last month. When Jackie ran the reports, she accidentally ran them from January 30 through February 26. February 26 is in March. Someone also keyed in 255 instead of 225, so they over-accrued in Pittsburgh by $30K. The business office is very eager to use AdDept for accruals.
I need to call Don Detelj¹⁸ to find out what he needs to replace the “data dump” from Aims.
Can AdDept generate the next claim number? They want to use the numbers generated by Aims for now, but they would like AdDept to assume this role in the near future.
The IBM people assigned an output queue from Macy’s West to all of the new users from Macy’s South. I talked with James Jordan about this, and he said that he would bring it up with Fran Ponder.
Annemarie is insistent that they get faxing capability for their insertion orders. Aurore says that they are trying to get them to do this. They will have to get a modem and a phone line. This could be a hassle.

It was unclear who “them” was in the last paragraph. Aurore presumably knew. It might be some combination of IBM, FSG, and someone in accounting to approve it.

The list of action items for TSI was much longer this month. That was, in some ways, a good sign. It meant that the department had enough confidence in the system that they were using it in different areas.

April 10-13, 2006 trip: Another large new wrinkle had been added to the installation: getting historical data from Foley’s and Hecht’s (introduced here).

New players: Wendy Ellis works in the newspaper area. She will probably be maintaining the newspaper ads once they have been activated. Andrea Harrison also works in the newspaper area. Kristal Brown¹⁹ is the planner for the home division. Linda Ashe²⁰ is the planner for storewide, cosmetics, and ready-to-wear.
They want to include Foley’s ads in AdDept for 052 and 061. Since people at Foley’s are available for data entry, I recommended that people from Foley’s key them in. They will set up a series of ad numbers for Foley’s to use. Someone is going to have to translate the ad types, pub codes, and cost codes. There may be other things involved, too.
I was able to sign on to Foley’s with no trouble.
The machine in Raleigh will soon have faxing capability.
The business office did their March accruals in AdDept by themselves without any evident difficulty.
Amy held a class to show people how to sign on to Foley’s and Hecht’s. I don’t agree with the way that she did it, but it would have been overreaching for me to criticize her. I suspect that she does not realize how dangerous that iSeries Navigator is. I would never tell any user about it if I were she.
I set up a menu named MACYREPTS on the Macy’s South, Foley’s, and Hecht’s systems so that they can sign on to the Foley’s system to run reports. It is currently identical to the SRADV menu. I later had to change the one on Macy’s South so that the Foley’s options did not show up.
I told Jackie and Cliff about the reports which I added to the MSABO menu. I had previously e-mailed them about this, but evidently they needed to hear it personally.
I created an output file for Cliff.
I had to reset quite a few passwords.
Cliff’s user ID was set up with the wrong library for the output queue. I fixed it.
I uploaded about 1,000 vendor addresses. There were actually more than this, but they did not have usable vendor ID’s on their records, so I had to program in some guesswork into the program that wrote out the records.
Jackie does not want to use multi-part forms for claims. They want to dump the impact printer. She prefers that we print three copies. The first should have the word “Original” on it somewhere. The second should say “Vendor Copy.” The third should say “Merchant Copy.”
They like the latest version of the newspaper calendar!

I don’t think that Cliff ever used AdDept except when I was there forcing him to do it. He was a weird guy.

Amy must have learned about iSeries Navigator in classes at IBM. It was (and is under its new name of Navigator for i) an incredibly powerful tool. I was definitely right to feel nervous about her talking about it with users. I probably should have at least warned her about it after the class that she taught.

The list of open items that I brought back to TSI contained one for the Roadmap produced by the planners. That one item contained at least a dozen sub-items.

June 6-8, 2006, trip: Amy had several meetings lined up for me: The first meeting was scheduled for 8:30 on Monday. Randy Reeves²¹, the new Divisional VP, was in a meeting and could not attend. Here are my notes.

We started with the ROP people. They now have three coordinators – Bill, Andrea, and April Dunn. Each is in charge of groups of markets. We signed on to the web site. I walked them through setting up their own contact information using the Default Contacts page and claiming their own pubs using the Individual Contacts page. We went through the entire process of ordering ads several times to make sure that everyone had it.
Bill was worried about the Lima, OH, newspaper. I called Eileen at TSI and asked her to call them to make sure that they were with the program.
They told me that they did not want to show costs. I had Eileen suppress costs for advertiser M055. I created a printer file named IO and associated it with M220 and M230 (insertion orders for ROP and inserts, respectively). I had to make some changes in DM220RSX. The pagination did not work right, and it did not show the header comments. I had to make some changes in DM220RSX. The pagination did not work right, and it did not show the header comments. I copied DM230RBTX to DM230RMSX. I made some changes to suppress the costs and to show blank lines of header comments. I also removed the “Authorized by” line.
We ran the insertion orders on Wednesday. They all went to A^XN without error. We discovered that there was a problem with the special instructions. I had to add a statement to line 72000 to initialize the SI$ variable each time. This problem was inherited from Foley’s. Faxing is not yet in place.

The second meeting was with the people who record expense invoices. My notes stated:

We went through the entire process of creating an invoice upload file. It all seemed to work smoothly. They know that they have to key in the addresses if they want them to appear on the aprons. If they have a kickback, they will fix it on the .csv file and then fix it on AdDept. They do not plan to upload invoices a second time.

I also met with the people from the Business Office.

Cliff and Jackie attended a training class on co-op commitments. The only problem that they saw with the way that we did it was in regards to leased departments.
We talked about how they will enter leased.²² I was given a copy of the roadmap for Leased. It is not that different from the others. They will enter the actual media costs and, for books, the non-home cost from Gretchen. They will enter the marked-up amount as co-op with contra type LD.

The meeting with the people in direct mail did not go as well:

I showed them how to paginate books. They were extremely discouraged. I tried to convince them that the work that they had done in option 4 (number of pages by merchant) was not wasted, but I am not sure that I succeeded.
I set the default for the GRFLAG to G. I could swear that I did this the last time that I was here. They never enter departments except for co-op.

A fair number of new problems were encountered, but most of the system was operating smoothly by the time that I left Atlanta.

One of the MSO meeting rooms. I carried my oversized laptop and business materials in the large bag. The little one was for my camera.

July 9-13, 2006 trip: This was an important visit. July is the last month of the spring season. I wrote a lot of notes.

New players: Brigitte Billingslea²³ processes expense invoices in the business office; Deonne (Dee) Wolters also works in the business office; Kristyn Page²⁴ from Foley’s works on multi-cultural ads in the planning area.
We had a meeting to set up a strategy for the soft closing. Cliff, Jackie, Beth, Aurore, Amy, and Randy attended. Most newspaper invoices for June were keyed in. However, no other invoices and no purchase orders were entered. Active ads were created for ads from Foley’s and Hecht’s. We needed to come up with a way of excluding them from all financials.

The notes listed eight steps that were taken to isolate the ads from Foley’s and Hecht’s. Note was then made of an unexpected and unwanted situation:

Aaaaarrrgh! The transition from Foley’s occurs in the middle of July between week 2 and week 3. This will make closing July extremely difficult. So the above process applied only to ads running in weeks 1-24. The last two weeks of the season must use a different process.

I included at this point an outline of a comprehensive plan to close June and then July. It took up most of a page single-spaced. Most of it concerned how to get all the data entered for June, but the short items for July and August were interesting.

Mary Wiseman²⁵ will accrue Foley’s expenses and send them to Cliff, who will enter them as a manual journal entry. Aims will be used for Macy’s South expenses. We will go through this whole process again next month. For August they will use AdDept somehow. There is no choice.

Then I listed what had been done on this trip to implement the plan:

I found three ads that had illegal values for the “Ad Type for Pages.” I fixed these and made sure that there were no others.
I twice scheduled the cost accounting to run in the evening, and I ran the actual version of the roadmap. It seemed OK to me, but there was nothing to compare it with.
For the purpose of catching up on entering expense invoices I recommended that they enter them in batches that were sorted by the month that the items were paid. Their natural inclination is to enter them by the month in which they were expensed. The business office people keyed in production invoices all week.
Cliff wanted a way to be able to see an audit trail of all of his manual journal entries. So, I planned to show him DA201, but I never got around to it.
The TSI user ID’s for both Dee and Brigitte had been set up so that they could not upload invoices. I changed both of them.
Amy told me that they do not exclude discounts when calculating percentage leased charges. I therefore changed that value in the specs. I also took out the default markup. She adds the markup to the percentage. I did not change the setting for co-op calculations. Amy was not in the office on Thursday. She had an emergency with her daughter.
I showed Cliff and Dee (who handles them) how to key in broadcast invoices. [Specific instructions for six tricky steps were listed.] I had to fix all of their existing broadcast invoices: All the DAMEDVD and DATRNSD records were off by 11.11%. I divided the amounts by .9. They pay gross at the market level! I created indirect sub-accounts AGCF5 (television) and AGCF6 (radio) to hold the credit for 10% of the gross. I added the credits to the invoices using DA282. When I fixed the broadcast invoices, it left the transactions out of balance. I needed to fix the OFFST entries.
Amy said that she thought that the process that I wrote up (suggested by Miriam) is too complicated. However, she did not have an alternative.

I brought back a list of problems. It was not overwhelming, but several items were gnarly.

This was the training room. It is also where they often let me work.

July 24-25, 2006 trip: There was a lot of tension. We were running out of time, and the game plan was to no one’s liking.

Amy, Beth, Cliff, and I spent Monday reconciling expenses for June. The newspaper accrual that they submitted included expenses for the last four days of May. This was a mistake. I wrote a query named MAY3DAYS in S_QRY to isolate these expenses for them. They eventually were able to tie it out. The broadcast accrual that I manipulated two weeks ago tied out. The P.O. accruals eventually tied out, too.
Beth got me a file of the invoices paid in June (except for prepaids). I made a database file name MSGL/AP0606 out of it. I then wrote a query named ALLAP in S_QRY to try to match it with invoices in AdDept. I created a second query named APTRNSMO to list the invoices with transaction month of June to try to get these to match up. By comparing the two we were able to find invoices with a posting month of June that were actually paid in earlier months. Amy moved them to the proper months using DA282. There were still unmatched invoices on the list of invoices for June, but they were for jobs in future months.
While we were doing all of this, the people in the business office were working on July.
On Tuesday Amy came in late because she had a flat tire. Beth worked on the ROF for July in the morning and had to leave about noon. We only got a few minutes of her time. I ran the open co-op report. It was much shorter than I expected. I soon learned that none o the co-op commitments for direct mail or preprints had been entered. I ran the Co-op Status by FOB report for June. I was able to match up the ROP pretty well. However, I could not use this to match up the actual co-op because the report from Aims included claims from July.
I created a few purchase orders for accruals that Cliff made in June.
I think they have given up on reconciling AdDept with Aims and the G/L for June and July. They just can’t seem to get the data entry done. However, they must use AdDept in August. That is now the highest priority. They will call me on Friday with their decision about when next I should come to Atlanta.
I explained to Amy how to key in the fax numbers for newspapers that do not subscribe to A^XN. Amy asked me for the umpteenth time about faxing, and I gave her the same answer as before. She called IBM in Raleigh. They said that there was no need for a prefix in dialing out. They also said that everything was configured, but I could see no fax jobs running.

A lot had been accomplished, but many difficult items still needed to be addressed.

August 21-24 trip: I wrote a very long report about this trip.

Cliff showed me an invoice upload that did not work. There were no DUNS numbers on the vendor records. I wrote a query named NODUNS in S_QRY to find these for them.
They finally balanced their gross expense for June.
I wrote a process for Cliff to check the expenses in the G/L against AdDept. It consists of a program named RMV40, a command with the same name, and four queries: GLSUM, GLMATCH, GLNOMATCH1, and GLNOMATCH2. The queries are all in S_QRY. I documented the process in the document named GLMATCH, which I will put in the Macy’s South client folder. GLSUM must be run after the program and before the other queries. Later we discovered that the invoice upload process was stripping off starting 0’s and converting to upper case. I wrote a program to replicate this. I ran it after GLSUM.
They had had trouble faxing to Hampton. I added some more delays before the 4, and it seemed to work. Later April got a new fax number from Hampton. The faxing works with the new number. I don’t understand how Hecht’s was able to use the old number.
They had a pep rally at the Ravinia Crown Plaza on Tuesday. No kidding.
They decided that they want to use real PO’s with real vendors for Spring 2007. They will create blanket PO’s for accrual purposes for the fall. Randy said that they want to use 061 actual costs for direct mail for Hecht’s, Foley’s, and Macy’s South. I ran the DM647 to get actual costs for each direct mail book on Hecht’s system and Foley’s system. I ran DM489 for each book in the month for February for Hecht’s to see if that was what he wanted.
I gave a little P.O. class to Amy – DP260 and DP261 – so that she could help the other people learn about P.O.’s. I deleted USEDP271. This was a vestige from Macy’s West.
We discovered on Tuesday that no estimates had been entered for preprints. Then we discovered that all changes to estimates had been entered in Aims rather than AdDept. Evidently the people in that area did not understand that Aims was no longer being used.
I wrote off all open purchase orders. They did not close July in AdDept, so all of the P.O.’s were left over from June or earlier. That meant that somehow we needed to get the P.O. accrual for July into AdDept in order for the cost accounting not to consider 100% of the late invoices as August expense.
I entered the radio, television, direct mail, and insert accruals for July. Cliff decided that he did not want to reaccrue any of these. I therefore entered two zero invoices to write them off in August. I ran the accrual for July. The items showed up. I ran it for August. They were not there. Cliff has been carrying a short-rate accrual for ROP. I entered it as an indirect P.O. that hit the ROP account. He wanted to continue carrying it in August.
I wrote a process for Cliff to check the prepaid invoices in the G/L against AdDept. It consists of a program named RMV40PPD, a command with the same name, and four queries: PPDSUM, PPDMATCH, PPDNO1, and PPDNO2. The queries are all in S_QRY. I documented the process in the document named PPDMATCH, which I will put in the Macy’s South client folder. PPDSUM must be run after the program and before the other queries. Later we discovered that the invoice upload process was stripping off starting 0’s and converting to upper case. I wrote a program to replicate this. I ran it after PPDSUM.
I do not think that the programs to strip zeroes (STRIPGL and STRIPPPD) will be needed in September. The invoice upload will have been changed so that the 0’s do not get stripped off, and they no longer can use lower case.
I created TSIFAXOUTQ in QGPL. I then associate this output queue with TSIFAXPRTF and TSIFAXPRTI in TSIDATAS.
I checked the results of the ROF worksheet (which Cliff said is now obsolete because of management changes) against the accounting. It seemed to balance for everything except for ROP and magazines.
I set the earliest month for co-op accruals to be 062-1. If there were accruals from 061, they are not compatible with the way that we do it. I then ran the report and gave it to Cliff.
They asked me to change the specs so that they could pay any ad, no matter the status.

Needless to say, I did not attend the pep rally.

I brought back nine issues. Most of them were problems, not requests for new programming.

November 9-13, 2006 trip: Things had settled down a bit according to my report;

I put together makeshift processes for them to use to print the detail of their non-media expense by G/L account. I documented both of these processes. Basically they create output files from their accruals. Then they do a query for their actuals. Then they combine the results into one file and query that file.
Their accrued co-op was way off because they had not relieved any commitments for ad load. I showed them how to do this with claims for $0.
I wrote a query S_QRY/ACTVBYFOB for Jackie to get a list of actual co-op by FOB. She will use this until DB522 is fixed. This query creates an output file. I also gave one to Cliff named ACTVBYFOBP that prints. There were some authority problems, but they were both working when I quit.
I wrote a query S_QRY/INDIRECTS to get actual expenses for indirects for a season. They need this for the “Macy’s West Report.” The directs will come from DD #27.
I wrote a query named S_QRY/LINATLBU to provide a backup for the contract status report (DM767). The query S_QRY/INVADJ06 must be run first.
I changed the definition of the FILTER condition in the SLSXFR menu so that the filter program would appear.
Cliff gave me a file of sales by department for a month. A separate tab shows the sales by store for a month. Unfortunately the stores in DASTORE are actually markets. We tried to determine whether there actually is a requirement for either sales by store by month or sales by market by month. Cliff did not think so. Karla does not need the sales by month, but she would definitely like the sales by day. Miriam was not available.
I went over the prerequisites for running the store cost accounting with Amy. Basically she needs to run the BOOKQ query and option 7 on menu DAYEND.
I changed the default printing for DA102 so that the default is to put the printout on hold.

A few problems were discovered, and a few requests were made.

January 2-4, 2007: Both the notes and the list of issues were shorter than usual.

I had previously provided them with a query to find the amounts to charge their leased departments. They had three problems with it: One department was overcharged for an ad that was only 50% leased. I gave them a query named NOT100LEAS in S_QRY to find these. On two ads the amount that she charged them did not match the query. Cliff thought that the query was wrong, but he was off by one ad when he tried to match up a report with a query.
Cliff uses DB653 to do his journal entries for “accrued co-op.” He “accrues” the difference between season-to-date actuals and season-to-date committed. He and I have a different idea about what accruing means.
I had to increase the record length of DASLSTSI from 30 to 35.
I made a couple of changes to DA168U to make it match the file that Cliff can easily deliver. It also multiplies the amounts by 1,000. I checked individual entries and the totals for the November file that Cliff provided me. Everything seemed to work.
I wrote up instructions on the sales upload process. I e-mailed the instructions to Cliff and Amy.
I met with Gretchen Watkins and the two ladies who work for her in production. I showed them how to create purchase orders using option 26 of WRKADS.
They wanted to split freight between printer freight and mailer freight. I created a new sub-account FRML3 based on FRGT3 and a new cost code 705. They also wanted to split the computer charges to estimate the cost for “tracking and tracing” separately. I created a new sub-account TR&T3 for tracing and tracing based on COMP3. I also created a new cost category 515. I checked a direct mail ad. The new cost categories both showed up in option 28.
They are in the process of installing a new workflow system called Work Horse. Amy wanted to know if we could create a .csv file to feed it. She said that she would have to find out what would be in the file.

This was the last trip to Macy’s South. Since it occurred in the last month of the fiscal year, I suspect that the department’s budget for the next year included no provision for paying for my presence.

My life in Buckhead: I never rented a car in Atlanta. I always took MARTA from the airport to Bulkhead. On the first trip the hotel was within walking distance from the train station. On subsequent trips I took taxis from the train station to the Hampton Inn. I usually walked to Macy’s headquarters. One time when it was raining I asked the hotel to call a cab for me. They got me a ride, but it was not in a licensed cab. I did not complain.

I remember a lot about working at Macy’s, but little about anything else. The MARTA rides to Buckhead were usually late at night. The airport is south of the city, and Buckhead is far to the north. Sometimes it was a little creepy. The route went through downtown Atlanta. Often groups of young people who had been clubbing boarded there. At one point my car was occupied by myself, a group of young black women, and a group of young white men. The women were talking, and the guys overheard them. A discussion about the wisdom of the invasion of Iraq ensued. I was happy when that trip ended.

I cannot remember ever socializing with anyone from Macy’s. I ate lunch by myself in the cafeteria. I sometimes ate supper in the food court at a neighboring mall. Most of the time, however, I stopped at Arby’s on the walk back to the hotel and picked up a Reuben or a roast beef sandwich and ate in my hotel room.

I have quite a few memories of the Atlanta airport. My flights usually departed from Terminal F, but after I cleared security I usually took the tram to Terminal E. The elevator ended in a food court that contained a pretty large Chili’s restaurant. I would usually eat supper there, and, if I did, I would order the Baby Back Ribs with broccoli instead of French fries.

That restaurant was the only part of the airport that I liked. It always seemed very loud to me, even though I almost always spent the waiting time listening to operas or Italian tapes on my Bose headphones.

Epilogue: TSI maintained a good productive relationship with Macy’s Central until 2009, when the headquarters in Buckhead was closed, and all advertising was scheduled, produced, and ordered from New York.

1. FedAd and Assets were software systems written by a group that had been organized by Gilbert Lorenzo of the Burdines division. The system was supposed to be one integrated system that covered all aspects of advertising. It was used by Burdines and Bon Marché. After the integration of all of the divisions into New York some version of it was used in the advertising department there. The attempts to entice me to involve TSI in this multi-milllion dollar undertaking are described here and here.

2. Like almost everyone in the department, Aurore worked at Macy’s until 2009, when the advertising operations were consolidated in Manhattan. Her LinkedIn page is here.

3. Cliff looked like Santa Claus. I spent quite a bit of time with him over the course of the years. He revealed to me that he had a fairly substantial business on the side selling things on eBay. On one of my trips he told me about his plan to sell programs from some sort of Martin Luther King event being held in Atlanta. He also told me that some of his goods came from dumpsters. His LinkedIn page is posted here.

4. Beth Lane was a CPA who worked part-time in the Business Office. I remember very little about her. Her LinkedIn page is here.

5. Steve Weinbaum was astounded that I was willing to try to replicate the MSO planning process. I explained that I had done a lot of AdDept installations. No one had anything like this process, but several of them had other aspects that were equally challenging. His attitude impressed me. I wished that I had been able to work with him more. His LinkedIn page can be found here.

6. Miriam Pechar’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. Laurie Stenwall’s LinkedIn page is here.

8. Karla Schottle’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

9. Jeanna Corley’s LinkedIn page is here.

10. Andrea Harrison later moved to newspaper scheduling. Her LinkedIn page is here.

11. Karen Martin’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

12. Annemarie Poterba’s LinkedIn page is located here.

13. Bill McFadden’s LinkedIn page can be seen here.

14. Gretchen Watkins’s LinkedIn page is here.

15. Steve Tesch’s LinkedIn page is here. I could not find a page for any of the other IBM people or James Jordan.

16. Bernice Bailey’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

17. Jackie Fould’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

18 Don Detelj (silent j) was always sort of a mysterious figure lurking on the outskirts of the installation. His LinkedIn page is here.

19. Kristal Brown’s LinkedIn page can be seen here.

20. Linda Ashe’s LinkedIn page is here.

21. The LinkedIn page for Randy Reeves can be found here.

22. Most department stores have at least one department that is operated by another company that leases the space. Those companies must pay for the advertising that is run for them.

23. Brigitte Billingslea’s LinkedIn page is located here.

24. Kristyn Page’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

25. Mary Wiseman’s LinkedIn page is here.

1991-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Hecht’s

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Mike

A May Co. division with headquarters in Arlington, VA. Continue reading →

In 1991 I received what probably was the most welcome business telephone call in my life. At the time TSI had only two AdDept¹ clients, Macy’s Northeast_², and P.A. Bergner & Co.³ I had recently sent to the advertising directors of several dozen other large retailers a letter that described the AdDept system and the positive effects that it had produced at its first two installations. The phone call was from Barbara Schane Jackson⁴ of the Hecht Company, a department store chain in the mid-Atlantic area. I did not realize it before that first call, but Hecht’s was one of the divisions of the May Company.

Barbara explained that the advertising department was looking for a system that would handle its administrative requirements. She emphasized that it absolutely must be able to produce the data for the 790, a monthly report required by the May Co. that broke out advertising expenses and co-op at the CCN⁵ level. She explained that at the end of every month the financial area of the department struggled to get the report out by combining the data from many spreadsheets. They were barely able to do this by leaving six or seven PC’s running all night. There were two big disadvantages. 1) If anything went wrong, they had no plan B. The May Co. required them to file the report within a week after the end of the month. 2) Hecht’s had recently acquired more stores, and they anticipated more acquisitions in the near future. Their PC approach probably could not handle the additional load.

When I assured her that this sounded feasible, Barbara invited us to visit their headquarters in Arlington, VA, and, if possible, do a demo of the system. This was music to my ears. Not only was Hecht’s a very well qualified prospect for the AdDept System. If we did a good job, we would have a much better chance of signing up the eleven other divisions of department stores owned by the May Company that were all very well-qualified prospects for the AdDept system .

Our marketing person at the time was Tom Moran⁶. Sue Comparetto, Tom, and I drove down to Washington in Sue’s Saturn station wagon. We certainly could not have afforded to buy three round-trip plane tickets at the time. We stayed at a Motel 6 in Maryland just outside of Washington. We could afford nothing better. Actually we could not afford that.

I don’t remember too many of the details about the visit. We met in Hecht’s Arlington store, which was in the Ballston Common Mall. In addition to Barbara and the advertising director, whose name was, I think, Steve, we also probably met with the media, production, and finance managers. Barbara certainly provided me with all the requirements for the 790 report. It did not seem too daunting. The rules were more complicated than the ones that Macy’s used for their reports by Vice President, but the principles were very similar.

Barbara at some point demonstrated the process that they used at the time, which involved Lotus 123 spreadsheets. I could not believe how adept she was at the use of this product. Her fingers flew around the keyboard executing commands and macros.

I did a demo for them at an IBM office in . Barbara later told me that she and Steve had serious doubts about how the answer to their problems could possibly be this ugly. She might have been referring to my appearance, but I think that they were most likely underwhelmed by the AS/400’s⁷ green screens and the pedestrian nature of its reports. There were no graphics of any sort anywhere. The only flash that my presentation had was how fast the screens appeared. In those days users were accustomed to substantial delays going from one step to the next.

The proposal that I wrote for Hecht’s was much more detailed about the contents of the first stage of the installation than what I had submitted to Macy’s or Bergner’s. We recommended, as I recall, that they purchase a model D10, a box that was considerably faster than TSI’s developmental system, but probably not as fast as the one used by Macy’s and Bergner’s.

The hardware determination was largely guesswork. IBM did not provide the usual performance numbers about its systems. For example, there were no statistics about the clock speed of the processors. I later came to understand why IBM did this, but at that time it seemed very strange that two different models actually had the same processors. The only difference was that the more expensive one had the capacity for more disk drives and memory cards. It did not come with these features; it merely had a way to attach them. I always recommended the more economical system unless the client really had a need for those drives or cards.

The installation began in October of 1991. The process of integrating the necessary changes was, as expected, difficult. However, it was never unpleasant. Barbara was a superb liaison, and most of the modules went in with no significant problems. The changes that I had to make to the cost accounting⁸ programs caused me quite a few headaches.

At one point I tried to document the steps of the “explosion” process—TSI’s term for the set of program that created the detail and summary files used by the programs that produced the 790 report. I quit after I had produced ten pages. I was not close to finished, and the result was totally unreadable. Every sentence started with the word “If”.

A major enhancement for Hecht’s provided for different types of costs being allocated in different ways. This required establishment of a table of allocation codes as well as an interface with the mainframe’s sales system to obtain the sales by department for the month. We also provided for a set of reconciliation programs to check the consistency of the results.

I distinctly remember two of the first attempts that we made to generate the cost accounting files. In both cases, Barbara submitted the program to run in batch mode (not tying up any input devices). I was in Enfield, but my AS/400 session had “passed through” to Hecht’s system. At the same time I was on the phone with Barbara.

Angus Podgorny was humanity’s last hope at Wimbledon.

In the first instance I was a little bit worried about how large the detail file that the system created might become. I monitored it and what the percentage of the ads that the program had already handled.

After just a few minutes I realized that the file was becoming very large very quickly. “Oh, no!” I warned Barbara. “The program is eating up the disk like the Blancmange! You’ve got to go to the system console and kill the job immediately.”

I am not sure whether Barbara understood the Monty Python reference (in which a Blancmange from planet Skyron of the Andromeda Galaxy eats people in order to win Wimbledon), but she laughed anyway. She certainly knew what a blancmange was; she had actually majored in French. She killed the job in plenty of time, and I deleted the records in the file.

The disk-gobbling program could have been a serious problem. If the the system’s disk drives had approached 100 percent usage, I am not sure what would have happened. It would not have been pleasant; we almost certainly would have had to involve IBM. After the job was killed, and the file was whittled down to size, I had to change the program to summarize in a few places where it had been writing details. This was a major repair, and it took me a while.

The second incident involved some kind of tricky allocation that I had not anticipated. I don’t remember the details. Barbara had already called two or three times to report that this aspect of the program was not working correctly. Each time I thought that I had fixed it. In the last call I admitted that “I just can’t seem to get this right!” I did not mean that I was giving up on it. In fact, I found the final problem in less than an hour after acknowledging my failures.

When we got the cost accounting program to work perfectly, Hecht’s was very happy.

The airport is at the bottom of this map. Taking the Metro was fine unless there was a problem.

I made quite a few trips to Hecht’s during the first phase of the installation. There were direct flights from Bradley to National Airport in Washington on US Airways. From the airport I took the Metro or a taxi to Ballston. I could be at Hecht’s before business hours, a feat that I could never manage at Macy’s, which was less than half as far away from Enfield.

If my visit was for more than one day, I generally stayed at a Comfort Inn that was within a few blocks of the mall.⁹ I always left the hotel early in the morning. I bought a Washington Post from the dispenser just outside of the mall—for twenty-five cents! I then took the escalator down to the food court and bought a Big Breakfast or an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee from McDonald’s. I ate my breakfast while reading the Post. I also drank about half of the coffee.

Coffee in hand, I rode the escalator back up. I then entered Hecht’s through the employee entrance, signed in, and took the elevator up to the advertising department. I worked mostly with Barbara. She did most of the training or the other users.

About half the time Barbara and I ate lunch at a restaurant in the mall. It was called the American Restaurant or something similar. We talked mostly about the installation and related matters. She knew that I went jogging in the evenings when I was there; she was surprised that I could survive without my glasses. She was a swimmer. The ropes that marked the lanes evidently kept her from getting lost.

She also told me something about needing to use a shop-vac on one occasion.

All of this seemed a little strange to me. Her husband, Kevin Jackson, also worked in the advertising department. My recollection is that he was an art director; he had no contact with the system. He never came to lunch with us.

Barbara resigned from Hecht’s in May of 1993 to work for Barrister Information Systems, a company that created and marketed a software system for law firms.

After Barbara left, Hecht’s continued to use the system, but they did not ask us for much more work, and they did not take advantage of many of the programs that they had. I do not remember the names of very many employees. In fact, the only one whom I recall was Ellen Horn, and that was mostly due to the fact that I saw her so often at her next stop, Belk.

I discovered quite a few notes about the account that covered the period from 2000-2003. I have somewhat vague memories of some of them. Here are some of the people who were mentioned.

Jim Tonnessen surrounded by his computers.

Jim Tonnessen¹⁰ was our liaison at the turn of the century. I think that he also managed the department’s network, which was installed after AdDept was functional. Jim took a job with UUNet in February, 2000.
Jim was replaced by Clint Gibson, but he also departed in August of the same year.
The nexttechnical liaison was Sam Wiafe, who was later known as Kwadwo.¹¹ I guess that he knew computers, but he knew nothing about AdDept, the AS/400, or the needs of the advertising department. The IT people tried to implement a firewall for the AS/440 in order to control access. It was a silly idea that angered me a little.
Jennifer Jones¹² was the manager of the advertising business office in 2000. Chris Dechene¹³ held that position before her. I made a trip to Hecht’s in June of 1999 for the specific purpose of getting Chris acquainted with the cost accounting programs. One of the problems that we encountered at Hecht’s was that the financial people were rotated around every two years. So, as soon as anyone got a good handle on the cost accounting process, we could expect them to be transferred to another area. These people also were not exceptionally good at documenting their procedures.
Prior to 2000 Hecht’s for some reason did not use one of AdDept’s best features, insertion orders for newspaper advertising. On a trip there in that year I met Renee Gatling¹⁴, Ellen Rison, and someone named Sharon. Renee was already pretty good at getting around in AdDept. I convinced them that they should be faxing their orders using AdDept.
By the end of 2000 I think that our primary liaison at Hecht’s was someone named Amy. I don’t remember her, but when we installed the Media Management + interface for broadcast, she was involved. The broadcast buyers at that time were named Krista and Tiffany. I found their names in my notes.
In October 2002 Brian Kipp, whom I had worked with at Meier & Frank, became the planning manger in the advertising department. Carolyn Thompson and a woman named Renée worked for him.
I spent a good deal of time on one visit with Rene Basham¹⁵, who was the manager of the advertising business office. I was astounded to learn that she had not been using the reconciliation process that we set up for the cost accounting. I went through this with her and also worked on documenting the process for the next person who was rotated into the slot.

In looking through the notes I discovered two other interesting things. The first was that Hecht’s used a product called Wam!Net to deliver its ads electronically to the newspapers. The Associated Press developed a product called AdSend, which most large advertising departments used. At the time (early 2000) TSI was beginning to roll out our A^xN¹⁶ product for insertion orders via the Internet, and we were contemplating using the connection that the program established to send ads as well.

One day while I was at Hecht’s in 2002 the performance on the machine was terrible. In the notes I had attributed this to CFINT, an IBM program that I had completely forgotten about. It was a misbegotten effort from IBM to make customers pay more for use of the system for interactive jobs than for batch jobs by slowing the entire system down if the percentage of CPU used by batch jobs was too high!

The main effect of this effort, as far as I could ascertain, was to infuriate the customers. It is possible that the real motivation was to prevent the AS/400 from encroaching on the sales of other IBM systems.

I have one other peculiar recollection. At some point after 2002 I was in the office on a Saturday. It must have been November, and I must have passed through to Hecht’s system to help someone there with a problem. We exchanged a few messages. I then whimsically invited her to come the following day to a big party that I was throwing to celebrate the divestiture of the foliage on the nine maple trees on my property. I recommended that she recruit a bunch of people with their own rakes. An early start would reward them with the spectacular view of the sunrise from the New Jersey Turnpike. I reckoned that they should have time for six or seven hours of New England’s favorite autumnal sport before returning home. They could make it back by midnight unless they encountered traffic.

On February 1, 2006, Federated Department Stores, which had purchased the entire May Co., dissolved most of the former May Co. divisions, and the existing Hecht’s stores were divided between Macy’s East and Macy’s South. Few, if any, employees from Hecht’s headquarters in Arlington went to work for Macy’s.

1. The design of the AdDept system is described in a fair amount of detail here.

2. A description of the Macy’s installation has been posted here.

3. A description of the installation at Bergner’s can be read here.

4. Barbara Schane Jackson has her own consulting firm in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

5. Every department was assigned to exactly one CCN. The CCN’s were the same for each division of the May Company. The N stood for number, but I don’t think that I ever knew what the two C’s referred to.

6. More information about Tom Moran’s career at TSI can be found here.

7. The AS/400 was a multi-user relational database computer introduced by IBM in 1988. It is described in some detail here.

8. In AdDept we used the term “cost accounting” to describe the process of allocating costs to departments (or, in some installations, stores) for the ads in which their merchandise appeared and the cost of more generic ads (called “storewide”). This was a complicated activity that would require a small army of clerks if not done on the computer. Although the May Co. had precise rules about this process, it was almost impossible for the smaller divisions, which ran just as many ads (in fewer newspapers) and had just as many departments, to accomplish it within the deadlines. They therefore cut corners.

9. The mall is now called Ballston Quarter. It was (pretty much) closed down in 2016 and reopened in 2018. The hotel is still nearby.

10. In 2021 Jim works for Lockheed-Martin. His LinkedIn page is here.

11. Kwadwo’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here. In 2023 he was working for Inova Health Systems.

12. Jennifer Jones works as treasurer of a school. Her LinkedIn page can be found here. I wonder how many of her acquaintances have also seen The Song of Bernadette, the movie that won the actress Jennifer Jones an Oscar, and read all thirteen of the articles championing Losing Trick Count in the Bridge Bulletin written by the bridge expert Jennifer Jones. Not many, I wager.

13. Chris Dechene’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

14. Renee Gatling’s profile on LinkedIn can be found here.

15. Rene Basham is still in the Washington area. Her LinkedIn page is here.

16. The design of A^xN is described in some detail here

1993-1996 TSI: AdDept-Burdines Interface

Posted on July 5, 2021 by Mike

The proverbial brass ring? Continue reading →

Even before I became a professional software developer, my friends and acquaintances often approached me with their ideas for computer programs. It started in the Army with Doc Malloy’s idea for a tennis game, continued through graduate school, and was nearly ever-present in my business life. It seemed peculiar to me that so many people seemed to imagine that I had a skill that they lacked but no idea how best to employ it.

I have a great idea for a software project!

In point of fact, the limiting factor in software development was almost always money. A new software system required a substantial investment to cover development and testing costs, as well as marketing expenses. Very seldom did the people who propose these project give any thought to helping to finance them. At least they never volunteered information about having a secret source of funds. They evidently thought that they should share in the imaginary profits because they provided the original idea. I sometimes told them, “ideas are a dime a dozen. Implementation is everything, and marketing brings it home.”

I had plenty of ideas of my own. A few of them, such as the idea of running several simultaneous “threads” for the cost accounting programs generated a bit of revenue for TSI. One of my ideas, the use of a butterfly-shaped website for insertion orders and emails for notifications, resulted in a very profitable product for TSI, A^xN. The genesis of its design and the marketing concept that turned it into a financial winner is described here.

TSI’s clients also had a large number of ideas for programming, but they seldom expected us to work pro bono. I spent many hours researching and writing quotes for changes to our systems requested by our clients. I doubt that a month went by in which I failed to produce produce ten or twenty of them. I considered my most important responsibility at TSI to be providing a clear description of each requested project and assigning an appropriate cost figure.

Very seldom did someone approach me with a project that included funding. I can think of three times in forty years. Only one of these concerned software that we had already designed and coded. The person making the proposal was Gilbert Lorenzo¹, who was one of the top bosses in the advertising department at Burdines, the Florida division of Federated Department Stores.

Gilbert telephoned TSI’s office in the early nineties. He had received one of our first mailings about AdDept, our administrative system for large retail advertising departments. He said that he would be in New England to meet with some people at Camex², the company based in Boston that marketed a system for digitally producing page layouts for newspapers and large advertisers. He requested us to show him a demonstration of the AdDept system.

Most of this huge structure served IBM’s business partners.

We reserved some time in a demonstration room at the elegant IBM office in Waltham, MA. We had a relationship with this office, but we had never done an AdDept demo there before. I arrived there as early as I could to get the system set up for my presentation. It was a very nice facility that always impressed potential clients.

The AdDept system in those days was fundamentally sound, but many “bells and whistles” were added on in the subsequent decade. In almost every case they were suggested by and paid for by one AdDept client or another.

The most impressive thing about the demos in the early years was the speed with which the programs moved from one screen to the next. Once the tables were set up, a user could define all aspects of a new ad to run in dozens of papers in just a minute or so. This always generated the biggest “Wow!”

In our discussion after the meeting Gilbert said that he liked what he saw. He might have even said that he wanted to buy the system. However, I did not hear from him again for several years. This was consistent with what always seemed to happen with Federated’s divisions, a phenomenon that is explored in more detail here.

Meanwhile Burdines was—unbeknownst to me—experiencing explosive growth. In 1991 alone the number of stores increased from twenty-seven to fifty-eight through the assimilation of two Federated divisions— the Maas Brothers and Jordan Marsh stores in Florida. More stores were added throughout the rest of the nineties. By the end of the decade Burdines dominated the department store market throughout the entire state.

The purpose of Gilbert’s second contact with TSI was to invite me to Huntsville, AL, the home of a software company with which he was working at the time. I don’t remember the name of the company. I do recall that two of the team assigned to this project formerly worked as software developers at Camex before DuPont purchased the company and changed its focus. One of them was Mike Rafferty³, whom I had met at Camex’s headquarters when our common customers had requested that an interface should be constructed between the two systems, a project that was described here.

The software company in Huntsville had a very impressive headquarters. As I understood it, the company’s primary customers were NASA and companies that worked with NASA. That was de rigueur in Huntsville.

Gilbert explained that he was working with Mike and the others to develop a comprehensive software system for the advertising department at Burdines, and he hoped and expected that the other Federated divisions would also use it. He wanted TSI (or at least me) to participate in the project, and he insisted that he had the funding for it.

Mike described their approach to the project. They intended to use a home-grown database that resided on a server, but most of the programs would reside on the individual “clients”—PC’s or Macs. When I told him that TSI’s programs were written in BASIC, he suggested that we consider converting them to use Microsoft’s Visual Basic.

Most of the discussion concerned the scope of the project. They were interested in integrating something like AdDept into the unitary structure that they envisioned. No one addressed how TSI would be integrated into the development process. Maybe they expected me to fill in some of the details or to volunteer to research how difficult it would be. Maybe they knew that we seldom backed down from a project just because it was difficult.

The atmosphere was cordial and positive. I remember that we all went out to lunch together, and I ordered a Monte Cristo sandwich. Nevertheless, this meeting made me very uncomfortable. On the one hand, the prospect of installing a version of the AdDept system into all the remaining Federated divisions was way beyond tantalizing. It would be a dream come true. What they suggested would undoubtedly a big job, but TSI had a talented group of programmers who were quite familiar with both the subject matter, and the way that I liked to approach big challenges.

On the other hand, from my perspective the way that this project was described was adorned with “red flags”.

I had already researched the possibility of using Visual Basic. It might have been possible to convert some of the programs, but there were no tools designed to help. It would certainly have taken TSI several years to produce a workable system. We would be discarding all of the tools that we used in favor or ones that we had never used and, to my knowledge, had never been used by anyone in a data-intensive situation. TSI’s programmers would certainly need a lot of training. We would probably need to hire skilled employees or at least consultants to achieve any degree of efficiency.
Their whole architecture was different from what we used. In the AdDept system the data and all the programs resided on the AS/400 server. The “client-server” approach that they proposed located the data on a server, but the program were all distributed to the PC and Mac clients. To me this sounded like an administrative nightmare. All changes—including emergency fixes—must be installed on all of the clients.
I considered the AS/400 integral to AdDept’s success, and so did our customers. The operating system code was built on the database rather than the other way around. That meant that the system itself could never be used for programs with the the huge requirements for memory, disk, and processing speed that design and creation of advertising layouts required. The AS/400 was definitely not designed for that. However, it was ideal for administrative systems like AdDept. It competently handled so many problems with which all-purpose operating systems constantly struggled.
I trusted IBM and the AS/400’s database. I knew how to get the latter to function efficiently, and IBM’s support was unmatched in the industry. The idea of converting to a home-grown database seemed just preposterous.
By the time of the meeting in Huntsville TSI had finally turned the corner. The AdDept product had a solid client base and a good number of prospects outside of Federated. How could we continue to pursue AdDept development for those companies—which was relatively certain to generate revenue and good will—while devoting a great deal of time and attention to the massive Federated project? It did not seem possible to me.
Gilbert had said that he had funding, but he never provided any details about who, how, or how much.

Something about the project sounded fishy to me. They were interested in my participation, but they never specified how. Did they want to buy TSI? No one mentioned anything like that. Did they want to hire some or all of us? Did they just want me to consult with them as to the system design? Or was there something else?

At the end of the meeting, Mike asked me what format TSI preferred for exchange of information. Both of the programmers were very surprised when I told them that our offices were connected to all of the clients’ AS/400s via phone lines. We used the AS/400’s built-in messaging and word processing. No one had ever asked us to communicate outside of that.⁴ I told them that TSI’s employees had PC’s, and the company had a few modems, but we mostly used the PC’s as terminals to the AS/400.

The group did not come to any agreement about how the project was to proceed. I had an impression that they thought that I (who was well into my fifth decade on the planet) was a fossil. I, on the other hand, thought that they, who had dealt almost exclusively with production of ads for newspapers, dramatically underestimated the difficulty of designing a single multi-user database that was capable of handling all aspects of scheduling and managing the financial aspects of all media. The planning and cost accounting modules were even more challenging.

After the meeting I had a little bit of private time with one of the principals of the software company. He asked me what I thought about the project. I told him that it was interesting, but I did not see the ROI (return on investment) for combining the two systems. I remember his exact words. “ROI. Oh, yeah, where’s the ROI?”

I did not hear from any of them again, and I did not press for inclusion in their project. In all honesty I had too many other things demanding my attention. After a year or two I sometimes wondered whether Gilbert had abandoned the project or had gone ahead with it. The answer, it turned out, was somewhere in between. I spent no time searching for information about the project, but little hints turned up occasionally.

Our liaison at Lord & Taylor, Tom Caputo, described to me his experience interviewing for a job in the advertising department at Bloomingdale’s, a Federated division in New York City. He asked the people there about their computer system. They showed him boxes that contained the software for the FedAd system, which Federated had sent them and told them to use. The people at Bloomies had never unsealed the boxes.

When I installed the AdDept system at Macy’s South⁵ in December of 2005, TSI’s liaison there was Amy Diehl. Her official title was “FedAd Coordinator.” By then I knew that FedAd was the culmination of the project begun by Gilbert Lorenzo more than a decade earlier.

I soon learned that the advertising department at Macy’s South was not actually using the FedAd system at all because the programmers had admitted that it could not handle the department’s planning process. Instead they had been using parts of a previous version called Assets for a few tasks. I was astounded to learn that the Assets system used a Microsoft Access database. They had sent a boy to do a man’s job! Federated Systems Group no longer supported it.

Later we heard that Macy’s East was using the FedAd system, which by then had been given a different name. At the time its advertising department was still using the Loan Room system that TSI had written and implemented for them in the early nineties. That meant that for years the details of every ad were being entered into at least two separate systems.

I even quoted a bizarre request from Macy’s systems people to write an interface between their system and A^xN. I provided them with a quote, but nothing came of it.

In all of that time—more than two decades—I never heard anyone say anything good about FedAd. As far as I know it generated a great deal of expense and not a penny of revenue for the company. I only knew of one department that used it. TSI, in contrast, sold and installed thirty-five AdDept systems, each of which was customized to the needs of the individual departments.

On the other hand, I might have been able to carve out a career as the guru for Macy’s concerning administrative software for advertising. That would have certainly been something to crow about. After all, when the game was finally ended, Macy’s had all the marbles.

I doubt that they would have let me—and whatever portion of TSI was involved—participate from Enfield or East Windsor, and I doubt that they would have let us continue to perform or oversee work for their competitors. They might have allowed me to program for the AS/400—I saw several of them at the FSG data center in the Atlanta area. However, it was more likely the Gilbert would have required everyone in the process to use the same database. He seemed to be calling all the shots.

So, I probably would have had to sell my soul to Macy’s. I might have made a lot of money, but I think that I would have been miserable. Almost everyone in my acquaintance who had worked for one of our clients and then worked for Macy’s or a Federated division quit in the first few years and was openly bitter about the experience.

Finally, I must add that I suspect that there was a good possibility that the invitation to Huntsville was just a ruse to get me to expose the totality of the AdDept system to people who might be able to replicate it.

Epilogue: While researching the blog entry for TSI’s relationship with Federated Department Stores (posted here), I discovered that Val Walser’s LinkedIn page prominently features how she “directed development of a sophisticated, integrated software product” in the division run from Seattle. It must be referring to the system that Gilbert and Mike envisioned so many years earlier. I never heard anyone mention any other such system.

1. For some reason Gilbert Lorenzo has two LinkedIn pages. They are available here and here.

2. The Camex system was used by both of the first two AdDept users, Macy’s East, and the P.A. Bergner Co.

3. Mike Rafferty’s LinkedIn page is here. It did not provide much information about him when I discovered it in 2022.

4. Keep in mind that the Internet was in its infancy. At that time Microsoft had not yet completed its domination of the word processing and spreadsheet markets. Technical people used “message boards”, not email, for communication. AOL did not hit the web until 1997.

5. The installation at Macy’s South is described in detail here.

1988-2014 TSI: AdDept: System Structure

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Mike

A complicated system. Continue reading →

People who have not worked in retail advertising will probably have trouble understanding this entry. Nevertheless, because the AdDept system was the focus of my life for so many years, I feel obliged to document as much of its structure as I can remember. It did not occur to me that I might want to undertake such a task until very recently. Consequently, when I closed down TSI in 2014 I discarded almost all of the system’s documentation. The few computer files that I have subsequently found are mostly PageMaker documents. I don’t have that software on my computer, and the files are too large for the services that will convert them to pdf files online. So, I must rely on my memory, which is not as reliable as it once was.

AdDept was designed for and implemented in OS/400, the operating system of the AS/400 and its follow-on hardware. Some of the important and unique features of this operating system are described here. Every line of code that we wrote in 1988 still worked in 2014, and I have no reason to expect the code to stop working any time soon.

All programs were originally written in BASIC. Around the turn of the century IBM stopped supporting BASIC, but TSI was authorized to install the product (a compiler, and interpreters of both BASIC commands and BASIC procedures) on any system that use our software. This only caused one major problem, which is documented here. However, Denise Bessette did not like this arrangement and undertook to convert the programs to ILE RPG. I never appreciated the value of that idea, and I never took the time to learn that language, which is supported on no other system.

All data tables and the major programs in AdDept began with the letter D, which stood for department. This was for TSI’s benefit. The ad agency system used a similar structure, but no files or programs began with D. The second letter in AdDept tables was usually A, I, M, or P, which stood for accounting, (loan room) inventory, media, and production. Programs that were used for cleanup, copying, and other miscellaneous tasks began with DX.

All AdDept programs were stored in the same library¹. It was usually named TSIPROG. The data was in a library named TSIDATA. A few clients had additional data libraries for additional companies. At these installations we created a separate library called COMMON or TSIDATACOM to hold the tables that were used for both companies. For example, both companies probably used the same ad types and expense classes (major media). The tables used by both were moved from TSIDATA to the common library. A new data library was created for the data files for the second company. In the beginning it contained empty copies of all of the remaining files in TSIDATA.

No two instances of AdDept were the same, but each had the same TSIPROG library. The settings for each installation were designated in two ways: 1) A set of empty one-byte files, the existence of which activated certain features; 2) a file called DASPECS that contained a very large number of switches, descriptions, and system values. The program to maintain the system values was not on a menu, and users were not allowed to run it.

Everyone needed a user ID to sign on to the system. Those connecting through a network could have any number of simultaneous sessions open.

AdDept’s user table, which was also on no menu and could be run only by the AdDept liaison, limited the programs to which the user had access. If the same employee worked with two different data libraries, a second user ID was required. The two user ID’s would have different library lists.This arrangement may sound cumbersome to people who are used to managing hundreds or even thousands of nested folders, but it did not seem strange to the users of a multi-user system. Furthermore, it was absolutely critical that changes not be made on files in the wrong library. All TSI menus displayed the name of the data library to help eliminate confusion.

The retail calendar was accommodated by the season table. The key was a three-digit number. The first two digits were the fiscal year. The third digit was 0, 1, or 2. 0 meant that a standard twelve-month calendar was used. 1 and 2 were used for 4-5-4 retail calendars, which are described here. This table contained the name of the season, the starting date, and the number of weeks in the season.

Ads were classified by three separate codes:

The one-digit insertion code determined which set of screens was used for data entry. This was a fixed set, but more codes could be added for additional media.
The one-digit expense class identified how the ads were categorized for accounting purposes. Later a sub-class code (blank default) was added for one client.
The two-digit ad type was specified when an ad was created. This table held the insertion code and expense class. It also had a binary field to identify whether color charges were applicable.

Media vehicles, such as newspapers, magazines, and broadcast stations and networks (called pubs in AdDept), were identified by a five character codes combined with a two-digit number (usually 0). For newspapers at least one number was reserved for inserts (usually 10). The users specified the days on which the paper published, whether it was AM, PM, or a combo² and the paper’s depth (maximum number of inches vertically on a page). For direct mail the pubs were usually geographic markets.

Stores could be identified by a five-digit number.

Every pub had a list of stores that were associated with it. There was also a date-sensitive pub-store allocation table that contained the percentages allocated to each store associated with the pub. The key to this table included an effective date. Less than half the AdDept retailers allocated costs to stores, but the ability to do so was very important to those that did.

AdDept users almost never paid the published rates.

Rates for ROP and inserts were date-sensitive. For ROP separate rates could be entered for black-and-white and several different color choices. There were also tables for linage-based discounts and premiums for things like special positioning such as “back of main”—the last page on the first section of a paper. For inserts a table of usual quantities (thousands of copies) could be created, with rates for each.

The system needed to be able to find the right rate to apply whenever an ad was changed or moved. Costs could also be recalculated en masse when a new contract had been negotiated. These were attractive features.

Probably the best idea that I had when designing the system was to allow the definition of pub groups (identified by five-character codes) to specify sets of pubs in which the same ads often ran. Clients could have hundreds of these or none. When a new ad was created, one pub group could be specified. A schedule could automatically be created with all the pubs in the group.

The hierarchy of participating merchants had five levels in AdDept. The lowest (most detailed) was the department. The system called the other four ADMGP, GRPVP, SENVP, and GRSEN to match Macy’s East’s designations. Most retailers had only two: DMM’s and GMM’s. The May company used “CCN numbers” to group related departments. For each level each client determined the descriptions used on screens and reports.

Employees were identified by three-character codes. Employees could be assigned to production jobs. So, an employee could see a list of all of his open assignments.

The traffic system allowed specification of a code for each production job that determined the job’s production schedule. So, black-and-white ROP ads might have a three-week production schedule with eight steps. The number of days for each step could be specified. Then the system would count backwards from the release date to build a schedule of due dates that accounted for weekends and holidays. The completion dates of each could also be entered (an X meant “today”).

This seemed important to several clients, and we built it precisely the way it was described to us. However, the production employees did not like it. For one thing, most of them used Macs for working on the ads, and they found a text-based system clumsy. I don’t honestly think that they would have liked it much better with a GUI (graphical user interface) as the front end.

The accounting tables were similar to those in the GrandAd System (described here) or any other system. They were designed to be consistent with whatever system was used by the accounting department, but AdDept users did not need to memorize the very long codes that were common in those systems. In AdDept the main entity was the sub-account, which was identified by a five-character code. One corporate G/L account was specified for each sub-account.

The vendor table also had a five-character key. The corporate vendor number was specified there. This table was used for merchandise, media, production, and other vendors.

Categories of production costs were identified by three-digit codes, just as in the GrandAd system.

The Ad Files

The system had one major header file for ads of all types and a number of lists that were associated with it. The ads file³ was identified by the season, a five-digit ad number (usually generated by the system using client-specific rules), and a one character version code (usually blank). The ad number could either be entered or generated by the system. Data entry began with the specification of the run date and ad type. A large amount of information was deduced from those two values. The headline and size⁴ of the ad were then entered on the header screen, which also contained many other fields.

The second step for ads of all types was the media schedule. If the pub group was accurate, nothing had to be entered here for ROP and inserts. For direct mail the quantities by market were entered.

The third step was the list of participants with percentages and co-op commitments.

Expected production costs could either be entered as one lump sum or detailed by category.

Audit Trails

History records were created for any activity that affected planned, committed, or actual costs or income. Reports and screens were written for viewing them. A few custom reports were also written for clients.

Planning

New ads were ordinarily assigned a status of P, which stood for “planned”. When the plan was completely approved, a program could be run to change the status of all status P ads to A (active). At the same time records of the detail of the costs of those ads at that time were recorded in separate files named DAPLAN (by department or group) and DAPLANST (by store).

Changes could still be made to any aspect of any ad, of course. Those values were considered “committed”. The actual costs were based on the measurements and the invoices from the media and production vendors. Actual co-op was based on the “claims” that had been processed.

In subsequent years several AdDept users let the system build the entire schedule based on the previous year. Thus season 951 could be built based on the ads run in 941. This process was called “anniversarying”.

Cost Accounting

Most advertising departments were keenly interested in comparing planned, committed, and actual costs by merchant or by store. AdDept had programs that would create detailed records every night by store and/or merchant for all ads in the current season. The merchant records were stored in DACOMMD (committed) and DAPANDL (actual). The records by store were in DACMDST and DAACTST.

Numerous reports were written to allow comparison of planned, committed, and actual costs and income (from co-op). Some users also queried these files on a regular basis using IBM’s Query/400 product.

Interfaces

Broadcast ads could be fed into the system from Doner, the May Company’s ad agency, and from Media Management + files created either internally or by an agency. There may have been one or two others of these.

A couple of clients used ad agencies for their newspaper ads. TSI constructed interfaces to receive the ad schedules from the papers.

Several interfaces were created to send files to feed corporate Accounts Payable and General Ledger systems.

Sales at the department level could be downloaded from the mainframe. Customized reports helped gauge the effectiveness of ads in comparison with the costs.

Backup

It was easy to schedule a backup nightly and to schedule the cost accounting programs to start when the backup was done. The backup would not save files that had record locks. Any time that a record was read from a program that could update that file (as often occurred), the record was locked to prevent one user from accidentally overwriting the work of another. It was sometimes difficult to persuade users either to make sure that everyone had signed off every night or to shut down the interactive subsystem before backing up and restarting it later.

TSI recognized this problem and warned the users about the possibility of lost data if files were not backed up routinely and correctly. We even offered (for a modest fee) to check their backups every day and notify them by telephone if the backup for the previous nights did not complete correctly. Only one client took advantage of this service.

The failure to check backups resulted in one ugly mess that was described here.

Cleanup

By the standards of the day the cost accounting and history files often became extremely large. A menu of programs that permanently deleted records from old seasons was provided.

Other Modules

The Loan Room inventory system was successfully used by Macy’s East for approximately twenty years.

A Photo Shoots system was also designed for Macy’s East, but it was never implemented. I don’t remember why they lost interest in managing the activities of their studio. The location of the studio in Newark may have been a factor.

Many modules were developed for Belk. One that I remember calculated the store’s use tax liability for direct mail pieces for each jurisdiction.

Saks Inc. in 1999 wanted TSI to design a very complicated system for collecting data from the systems of each of its divisions and, eventually, to produce reports that compared divisions. I was very happy that nothing came of this idea.

A special module was created for Radio Shack to manage its advertisements in magazines.

I suspect that there must have been a dozen more of these modules that I cannot recall. We delivered hundreds of custom programs over the years and quoted a similar number that were never approved.

AdDept was a fabulous system. Because it contained so many features, it was somewhat difficult to demo. The screens and most of the reports were ugly. Nevertheless, as soon as prospective clients understood its potential, it was easy to sell to anyone with a budget.

Unfortunately by the time of the Bush-era Great Recession in 2008, Tarot card readings for most major retailers—especially the ones that did a lot of advertising—began with the thirteenth trump card: Death.

1. “Libraries” were a type of object on the AS/400. They were places to store other objects in the same way that folders or directories are used on PC’s. However, it was not possible to build a “tree” of libraries. All other libraries resided in the QUSR library.

2. Yes, a few papers still published two editions per day in the nineties.

3. As far as the OS/400 was concerned, DMADS, the ads file, and the files that contained all of the lists were equivalent to the tables. However, TSI’s organization and documentation drew a useful distinction between the relatively stable tables that were defined at the beginning of the installation and the much more volatile ad files and transaction files.

4. The size for ROP ads was entered in columns and inches. A full-page broadsheet ad was entered as 6×21. The program knew to adjust the inches to match the paper’s depth. The size for inserts was entered in terms of thousands of copies. The size for broadcast ads was the length of the spot in seconds, usually 15 or 30.

1981-1983 TSI: GrandAd: The First Two Clients

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Mike

1 + 1 = a marketable system? Continue reading →

We were very fortunate that IBM announced the Datamaster in 1981, the same year that Harland-Tine (H-T), an advertising agency in downtown Hartford, began its search for a computerized administrative system. Most advertising agencies both produce and place ads. At almost any ad agency that was large enough to consider automating, those two functions were assigned to separate groups of people. All previous low-end (under $20,000) IBM computers had no way for two users to share data. More details about the Datamaster can be read here.

Harland-Tine’s offices were in this building at 15 Lewis St., near Bushnell Park.

1981 was also the year that Sue and I moved back to Connecticut. We were also fortunate that Harland-Tine happened to have the same accountant, Dan Marra from Massa and Hensley, that TSI used. Dan told Dave Tine, the president of Harland-Tine about the time and materials billing system that we had written for his firm. As Bob Dylan sang in “Idiot Wind”, “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”

The unique nature of advertising agencies is described here. The system that we designed for Harland-Tine is described in considerable detail here.

The installation, which began in December of 1981, went pretty well. Westy Jones¹, the office manager, oversaw the installation. In phase 1, which lasted about six months, the system consisted of a job costing module, production and fee billing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger.

Near the end of the first phase Sue worked with the people at H-T to generate some publicity for both companies. The Basic Society News, a tabloid-sized monthly newspaper dedicated to the Datamaster community, published on the front page of its August 1982 edition a rather detailed account of the installation. It was a really nice write-up with well-chosen photos. We showed it to whomever we encountered.

Until I reread the article for this blog entry, I had forgotten that H-T had also purchased a second Datamaster to use for word processing. The Datamaster had outstanding WP software, but I don’t remember ever having seen a daisy-wheel printer in H-T’s office. The Datamaster’s dot-matrix printer did have a “letter-quality” mode that sort of filled in the dots, but I would not expect any advertising agency to settle for that. Agencies are all about presentation, and dot-matrix output has never really been considered appropriate for important communications.

I have no memory of anyone named Janna Sherman. Maybe she used the Datamaster for word processing.

The second phase of the installation involved the module for media scheduling—including insertion orders, media billing, and media payables—and cost accounting (client profitability). My recollection is that H-T was able to use most of what we had developed for Potter Hazlehurst without significant changes.

I am pretty sure that H-T purchased the 30MB hard drive when they for the second phase. I don’t remember whether they purchased a third Datamaster for the media department. They might have used the one that had originally been intended for word processing.

Westy is standing. The guy is an artist who had little or no involvement in the installation. This photo was probably staged.

Considering how much time that I spent on this project, I have surprisingly few vivid memories. Westy hired Diane Ciarcia² as a bookkeeper and primary operator of our system. She was, thank goodness, easy to work with. She was good at explaining why she didn’t like something that the software did. So, we were able to make the system rather easy to use without too many missteps.

At about the same time that Diane was hired, Sandy Bailey, a wise-cracking New Yorker, was hired as Director of Finance. She and I got along very well. She must have still been there in 1988. I remember remarking that we were furiously pitching the advertising department at Macy’s in New York. She said “If you get Macy’s, you’re all set.”

In 1984, I think, Harland-Tine merged with another Hartford agency the name of which escapes me. The other agency had been one of the very first agencies in the country to automate. Fortunately for us, their system ran on an outdated IBM 5120. So, the new agency, which set up shop in H-T’s office space, continued to use our software.

The new agency was named Harland, O’Conner, Tine, and White³. I never met O’Conner; I don’t even know the right pronoun to use. I occasionally saw Will White⁴ in his office, which contained several copies of The Sunfish Book that he wrote. I guess that it contained all that you ever need to know about a type of sailboat that I, a native of Kansas, had never heard of. You can still get a copy on Amazon.

Diane Ciarcia left the agency during this period. A young lady from Jamaica was hired to replace her. Because the system was rather stable by this time, we did not need to work closely with her. Eventually someone discovered that she had been issuing checks to accounts that she had opened under various reasonable-sounding names and booked them as production expenses for the agency’s largest account, Hitchcock Chair.

She was not able to run this scam for very long. Dan Marra discovered discrepancies using the month-end reports that our system produced. He credited the audit trails that the system provided with unearthing the scheme. H-T definitely fired her. I don’t know if she was ever prosecuted.

Everyone should agree that flavored coffees have no place in an office. If employees what to put stuff in their cups, fine. MAKE MINE BLACK!

I have one other strong memory of TSI’s first agency installation. This was the beginning of the period, which lasted for more than two decades, during which I consistently worked long hours often seven days per week. I also needed to be very alert whenever I was working. It was very easy to make catastrophic mistakes, and, as always, nobody checked my work. I had become dependent on help from coffee, especially when I was on the road.

I remember wandering into Harland-Tine’s kitchen⁵ one morning. I poured myself a cup of bitter black caffeine and ported it back to the accounting area. When the first few drops hit my tongue I almost spit them back into the cup. Evidently someone thought that it would be “a nice change” to add a little flavor.

The second ad agency that we landed was Potter Hazlehurst Incorporated (PHI) of East Greenwich, RI. As I recall, they responded to a mailing that we did in 1982. Sue and I drove to their office on Route 2, where we met with Russ Hahn, the office manager, and Bruce Brewster, the accounting manager. Russ said that he liked what we had done, but they also needed a system for media. He also said that they needed to be able to see a summary of the profitability of each client on one report. He showed me what he did by hand for Herb Sawyer, the agency’s president.

We drove back to Rockville and drew up a proposal. IBM proposed two Datamasters and the hard drive that acted as a server for both data and programs. One computer was designated for accounting and one for media.

Potter Hazlehurts’s offices were in this building. The parking lot was bigger in the eighties. They had about forty employees. Herb had a reserved spot for his black Celica.

On the second trip we met with Herb for lunch, which was served all’aperto. He had not been available to meet with us on the first visit. I was almost as nervous as I had been back in 1962 in my first debate in high school, which is described here. Herb was friendly but serious. I could see that he had some doubts about our ability to pull this off. In the end he signed the contract, and we went to work.

A very fortunate thing for us was that PHI billed all of its media in advance. For example, they billed in the month of November the ads scheduled to run in December,. We designed the system so that prebilling the media was the norm. This helped us in the future in two distinct ways.

It was much easier to accommodate billing in the same month or a later month than it would have been if we had started with the assumption that the ads had already run and tried to come up with a way of handling prebilled placements.
It gave us a valuable selling feature. If the agency already prebilled their media, the system could handle it. On the other hand, if it did not, using our system gave the agency the opportunity to try to convince their clients that they should get the invoices in the preceding month so that they paid in the month that the ads ran. In those inflationary times, receiving the money a month or two earlier could be a big factor.

In the eighties “Online” and “Mobile” were science fiction, but “Print” included newspapers, magazines, direct mail, polybags, yellow pages, and others.

A difficult decision had to be made about the design of the media scheduling system. The different types of media differed greatly. For example ads in print media generally ran only once in an issue of a publication. Broadcast ads almost always ran repeatedly, and most of the time the date and even the program might not be specified. The size of a print ad was measured in column inches. The size of a broadcast ad was measured in seconds. The most surprising thing to me was the “broadcast calendar” that began every month on a Monday.

Furthermore, some types of ads, like billboards or yellow page advertising were sui generis.

On the other hand, it would be easier for the accounting people if the important financial information was in one place. Data entry for billing and payment would be easier, and the programs would run faster.

I decided to designate one file in which all ads were defined. It contained all the financial information and all of the other information for print ads. The fields that were peculiar to broadcast were kept in a separate file. Eventually we created a file for yellow pages, too.

The key to the ads file was the client number, the ad number (usually, but not always the production job number), and a one-character version code to distinguish different sizes of the same basic ad. I never regretted handling media this way.

I spent many days at PHI. I remember every inch of the drive. Most of the morning drives were toward the east. The sun was directly in my eyes. The return trips were mostly due west, and the sun was again in my eyes. I did not own prescription sunglasses. If there were clip-ons available, I did not know about them. It was brutal.

The Burger King in Killingly is still there, but now it has a lot of competition.

There was not much in the way of retail between Rhode Island and Rockville. On return trips I would almost always stop at the drive-through window of the Burger King on Route 101 in Killingly, CT. The consistent part of my order was a large Diet Coke to keep me alert for the rest of the journey.

If, as often happened, it was late, I would also order a whopper. One time they had a special on “Bullseye burgers”, which were two regular BK hamburgers that were a little thicker than usual and cooked with Bullseye barbecue sauce. The burgers were placed on a long roll and topped with bacon. I ordered one, and I really liked it. Ever since, whenever I cook burgers for myself on the grill, I mix Bullseye barbecue sauce in with the ground beef before cooking.

Incidentally, I have very long fingers. At the time BK advertised that “It takes two hands to handle a Whopper.” I can assure you that I was easily able to drive while holding any BK sandwich in one hand. It did get a little clumsy if I had to change gears on my Celica.

I remember that one time I worked so late that I had to stay overnight. PHI arranged a room for me at a motel in North Kingstown, the next town to the south. It was run by an Indian couple (a rarity in New England in the eighties) with forty or fifty children who had the run of the place. It was an unusual experience for a Kansan, but I did not encounter any difficulties.

I cannot remember much about any of PHI’s employees other than Russ and Bruce. I remember noticing that over half of them had Italian names.

Bruce was a little younger than I was. He was a big guy. He was really into sailing. He had a boat of his own, and he devoted most of his spare time to it. He also disclosed to me that he would really like to be a crewman on a yacht that competed for the America’s Cup.

Russ was a few years older than I was. He was a bit of a fuddy-duddy, but he always took me to lunch. I really appreciated that. When the agency’s fortunes began to slide in the nineties, he was one of the first employees to be laid off.

I am not sure of the year in which PHI closed its doors for good. At the very end Herb Sawyer was operating the Datamaster by himself and calling us for help in closing the books. I found this rather sad.

When the PHI installation stabilized, we no longer had two customers with separate systems. We had two diverse advertising agencies using customized versions of the GrandAd system. I was fairly confident that we could market it successfully.

1. I think that Westy’s last name is now King, and in 2021 she resides in Enfield.

2.Diane’s married name is Carrabba. In 2021 she apparently lives in Bloomfield.

3. The accepted abbreviation was “Hot W”. If I had been asked my opinion, I would have suggested putting Mister White first and using “White hot” for short. It is probably a good thing that they didn’t. Shortly after incorporating, they changed the name to Harland & Tine & White.

4. I think that Will White is living in Arcadia, FL, in 2021.

5. It was a real kitchen, not just a place to make coffee and keep lunches. Susan Harland often prepared gourmet meals for clients and prospects.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Cost Accounting

2005-2009 TSI: AdDept Client: Macy’s South

1991-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Hecht’s

1993-1996 TSI: AdDept-Burdines Interface

1988-2014 TSI: AdDept: System Structure

1981-1983 TSI: GrandAd: The First Two Clients