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The advertising people at MSO had been struggling to use an outdated version of FedAd named Assets.¹ It was no longer supported by the development team, and no one thought that it could handle the increased load of two new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.

2000-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Meier & Frank

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Mike

Department store division of the May Co. with headquarters in Portland, OR. Continue reading →

Since 1932 M&F’s flagship store had occupied an entire block in downtown Portland.

Meier & Frank was a chain of departments stores owned by the May Company. Its headquarters was in Portland, OR. TSI never pitched the AdDept system to the store’s advertising department. In 1998 the May Company decided to order AdDept systems for the three department store divisions that were not already using it—Robinsons-May, Meier & Frank, and Filene’s.

M&F was by far the smallest of the May Company’s department store divisions. At the time of the installation it had only seven stores, which made it barely a quarter the size of the next smallest division.

These installations were quite different from the other systems that TSI had installed at May Co. divisions. They began with three days of rather intense sessions in TSI’s office in Enfield. We were teaching them about the system design of AdDept, and they were informing us about their policies and expectations for the system.

The previous May Co. installations began with a site visit in which I had learned about each department’s business procedures and priorities. TSI then presented a formal proposal for the base system and any custom code that I thought was needed. Only after the system had been delivered and installed did we provide training, and it took place at the company’s location.

At some point in 1996 a group of people from M&F visited TSI’s office for orientation and training. Those sessions were also attended by people who would be involved with the installation at Rob-May. Robert Myers, with whom we worked in the AdDept installation in the advertising department of the Foley’s division (described here), also was there to provide the perspective of a user of the system.

I found several photos that I took on the occasion of their visit as well as photos that I took in Portland. Since I was still using disposable cameras in those days, the quality of the prints is not great. I was lucky to have this much. On one trip I left a camera that was full of photos in my rental car. I called Avis on my next visit and learned that they had found the camera. They later mailed it to me.

The people: The photo at the left was taken after one of the training days in Enfield. On the last evening we all went to the Mill on the River restaurant, but I think that this photo might have been taken at a different place.

Robert Myers was seated next to me. In the photo he is on the far right. Three representatives of M&F are on the left. I am pretty sure that the guy with glasses was Brent Stapleton¹, who managed the departmental network and was our liaison for the first part of the project. I do not remember the name of the fellow on his left, but I am pretty sure that his hobby was making root beer at home. He might have been Steve Mulligan, the Co-op Coordinator who moved to Ireland the following summer. I don’t remember the woman’s name or function, and I don’t recognize the next fellow. He might have been from Robinsons-May. None of these people appear in any of the photos that I took on my trips to Portland.

The last person on the left side of the table was definitely Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director, who sat in on some of the training sessions. The other two people were from Rob-May and are described here.

The system was not actually installed at M&F until March of 2000. I think that they postponed it because Kaufmann’s and Rob-May were higher priorities.

The next five photos were taken at the department’s office on the thirteenth floor of the flagship store in Portland. The building had fifteen floors.

In the photo on the right, the seated woman was Dori Tierney², who was responsible for scheduling M&F’s ads in the newspapers. She also produced the weekly calendar that was the primary document that was used by many people inside the department and out. The other woman was her boss, Sheila Wilson³, the Newspaper Manager. She formerly had worked at Hecht’s.

In the first year of the installation I worked with Dori more than anyone else because producing that calendar was the department’s first objective for the AdDept system.

I am almost certain that the woman surrounded by papers in the photo on the left was Kathy Reed, the Business Office Manager. One of her primary responsibilities was to produce at the end of the month the report of expenses and co-op income by CCN in the May Company’s required format, the so-called 790. AdDept produced this at all of the other divisions. We never succeeded at completely automating that process at M&F for reasons that are explained in the section about AdDept projects below.

I have no recollection of the people in the photo at right. Maybe I took this shot because they were both so photogenic.

Many of the people in the advertising department at M&F did their work on clunky old IBM PC’s. They complained that all of their machines were hand-me-downs from their counterparts at Robinsons-May in California.

I took the two photos shown above at the M&F office in Portland, OR. I do not remember the name or function of the woman on the left. The guy on the right was Bryan Kipp, the Planning Manager.

From searches on LinkedIn I discovered that the Broadcast Manager at the time was Shauna Thompson, and the Direct Mail Manager was Linda Farrington. I probably worked with both of them.

The first visit: A month or so after the training session in Enfield Doug Pease and I flew out to Portland so that I could install the TSI software on the AS/400 that IBM had delivered. We also met with several executives to make sure that we understood and could address the department’s priorities.

I was surprised to see that the entirety of eastern Oregon was essentially desolate, and the coast was so rugged as to be almost uninhabitable. The majority of Oregonians were concentrated in the cities along the Willamette River.

Multnomah falls is about 30 miles east of Portland on the Columbia River.

In those days it was much cheaper to fly on Saturday than on Sunday, and Doug and I did that on the first trip. I found among my M&F photos several of Mt. Hood and Multnomah Falls. On Sunday we took our rental car on a spin around the very scenic areas east of Portland. Kate Behart and I had also visited these sites on a sales trip to Fred Meyer⁴, another retailer based in Portland, a few years earlier.

The Senior Vice-president of Marketing at M&F was Emily White⁵, whom Doug knew from when they both worked in the advertising department of the G. Fox department store chain in Hartford. She knew about TSI’s capabilities from her time at Macy’s West. The Advertising Director was Laura Rutenis⁶. I think that she had previously worked at Hecht’s.

On the first visit Doug and I spent quite a bit of time talking with Emily and Laura. They explained their difficulty as the smallest of the May Co. divisions. They had far fewer employees than the other divisions, but their stores had just as many selling departments, and they ran just as many ads (in fewer newspapers, of course), and they were expected to produce the same reports as all the other divisions.

The primary objective of the AdDept system would be to get the module for newspaper ads up and running as quickly as possible and to produce their weekly calendar in the format that they currently used. At the same time the quantitative and qualitative information for ads for all of the other media needed to be entered into the system so that all the expenses could be entered in AdDept (or imported from PC systems) and uploaded to the corporate accounting system. So, the remainder of the time on the first visit was spent familiarizing the employees with the programs for entering the data and showing them how to check their work.

The projects: I don’t remember much about most projects that we did for M&F. I am sure that the May Company wanted them to produce the 790 report using the AdDept system’s cost accounting programs. That would require them to enter (or upload from another source) all the expenses from every media. I am pretty sure that we reached the point at which all of the necessary data was in the system.

Nevertheless, AdDept never produced the 790 report at M&F because the department’s Business Office Manager had been fudging some of the allocations required by the May Co. The corporation’s internal auditor surely knew about this, but she had no assistants to help her in the Business Office, and it would not have been practical for her to implement all the required steps within the strict time restraints. I thought that it would be feasible for her to do it in AdDept, but I could understand why she did not want to commit to a process that she could never verify produced results that were consistent with her existing methods. Also, she was more confident that she could meet the deadline every month without using AdDept.

I definitely remember spending many hours working on the weekly advertising calendar, which was designed to be printed on a special Hewlett-Packard laser printer that the advertising department had purchased. It could handle very large forms. Printing from the AS/400 was ordinarily limited to text of at most 198 characters per line and a single non-proportional font, Courier New. So, it would not be easy to replicate what they were doing.

Every advertising department that we worked with produced a calendar that was the basis of communication with other departments and the brass. In every other case we had been able to convince them that what the AS/400 could produce in the usual way—with whatever changes they needed—would suffice. The alternative was for us to produce output files that could be downloaded to a PC and formatted for printing in Word, Excel, or other software, and a few chose that method. The people at M&F insisted that that was not good enough. They needed the calendar the way it currently looked and they did not want to take extra steps to provide it.

In order to produce the calendar that they required I decided to make use of research and coding involving PCL, the language that Hewlett-Packard’s printers used. Instead of creating “spooled files” that the AS/400 translated into PCL using its printer drivers, the program that I wrote for M&F created files of instructions that were sent directly to the printer. They bypassed the AS/400’s drivers because the files were already in the language that the printer understood.

This approach had the advantage of allowing the use of proportional fonts such as Ariel or Times Roman. It also allowed the use of simple graphics such as boxes, variable font weights and sizes, italics, bolding, etc. The end result was definitely more attractive, but the big advantage was that the format was already familiar to the executives from other departments to whom it was delivered. It could all fit on one page that included attractive fonts, boxes, and other things that no one ever saw on a computerized report in the nineties.

From TSI’s perspective there were, however, serious disadvantages to this kind of approach. None of the other people at TSI were even slightly familiar with PCL. On this project I wrote all of the code myself.

By 1998 I was generating only a fairly small percentage of the new code at TSI’s office. I spent the bulk of my time traveling to clients, installing new systems, training, writing up proposals for new systems, modules, and requests for custom programming. I also had important administrative obligations, including locating more appropriate offices for TSI.

I suppose that I could have asked Denise Bessette, TSI’s VP of Product Development to learn PCL 5 from the handbook that I had found somewhere, but there was no guarantee that we would ever use this technique again. Besides, time was of the essence, and she already had a lot on her plate. By far the fastest way to deliver the code was for me to do it. There definitely was too little time for me to teach her in a formal setting how it worked.

Also, as will become obvious, the logistics would not have worked if the programming “team” had more than one member. Denise did not want to travel more than necessary.

Another big disadvantage was that it took much longer to write code for the printer than to write reports that could be sent to the printer driver for translation. We had been using the AS/400 long enough that we had that process down pat.

Furthermore, because TSI did not have a printer that could handle the oversized form, there was no way to test the finished product in the office in Enfield. I had to write little programs that produced segments of the calendar, test them on an HP printer that we did have, and then write the code that stitched them together. Also, I could not even look at the output on the screen. I ended up delivering the code to M&F in person and testing it at their site with real data.

I should mention that Denise did not like this kind of cowboy coding at all. She thought that everything should go through the tried-and-true process.

Finally, if M&F had run into problems with the calendar when I was on the road—which I often was during that period—Denise and the programmers might have trouble isolating the cause.

In retrospect it might have made sense for me to decline this project. Someone from the May Company would probably have stepped in to help them find a reasonable substitute. However, I wanted a happy client, and I was quite sure that the people at M&F would not have been happy with anything less than what I did.

I did get the calendar program to work, and I do not remember them reporting problems with it after the first few days. I might have needed to make small changes to handle situations that they forgot to tell me about. That almost always happened.

According to my notes by February 25, 2000, things were going reasonably well:

So far I have not picked up specs for a lot of custom programming. I spent much of yesterday working on the calendar and the insertion orders. I finally got the calendar so that it is exactly the way they wanted it. The first faxed insertion order cut off the top ten lines of the page. I fixed it by rotating 270 degrees instead of 90. I can’t understand why that would make a difference. We also had a query class for the people who have some experience in working with AdDept.

Life in the M&F advertising department: In general the people in the department, like nearly everyone that I met from the May Co., were hard-working and enthusiastic about their jobs. They did feel that they were the parent company’s ugly step-child, and there were many things besides the outdated electronic equipment to bolster that feeling. For example, there were no restrooms on the thirteenth floor that the department occupied. The store’s selling floors certainly had very nice restrooms, and the employees were allowed to use them. However, that involved taking an elevator down from the thirteenth floor and back, which could add several minutes to the project.

The alternative was to climb the stairs up to the fourteenth floor. That floor must have had a purpose at one time, but by 1998 it was just a relatively empty area with plumbing. I found it sort of exciting to go up there. It was like being in someone else’s attic. You never could predict what had been put up there just to be out of the way.

I used the men’s room up there whenever I felt adventurous. It was quicker, and I had very low standards in those days. The picture on the right is surely worth a thousand words. There was only one stall in the men’s room, but it was almost never occupied even though, as you can see, the one urinal was permanently out of order. The sign on it helpfully advised “DON’T PEE HERE.” Someone had added a “K” to the verb.

I seem to recall that there was also a ladies’ room up there, but it did not get used much. At any rate I did not try to persuade anyone of the fair sex to take photos for me.

This was not the only unusual sight at M&F. Here is what I wrote on February 25, 2000:

Meier& Frank is a strange place. They have by far the worst facilities of any department store I have been in. I will try to take some photos today. One guy’s office is so small he can easily touch both walls at the same time. Several people are sitting in a former conference room. There is a pile of discarded computers in one hallway. Many places are dirty. One corner in the main part of the office had huge dust bunnies. It could not have been cleaned in months. Nevertheless, everyone seems in good spirits.

Most of my time in the the first few trips was spent with Dori. She had a small desk in a fairly large office that also held a lot of records and that big printer. Dori had one very peculiar trait, that she did not try to hide. She would verbally accompany her work with a softly spoken play-by-play: “I am walking over to the printer to get the schedule. Now I am getting last week’s schedule out of the file. Now I am taking them to …”

At the time I found it incredible that they would put up with this annoying behavior. In retrospect I think that I was too judgmental. She did her job, and they kept her isolated enough that she did not drive anyone else crazy.

I remember that for one visit they assigned me to work in a very small two-person office. I swear that it was so narrow that I could touch two parallel walls at the same time. I was put there because one of the occupants was on vacation. I found my temporary officemate quite funny. I remember that he had posted on the wall a cartoon of Beavis and Butthead talking about the newly elected team of Bush and Cheney. The balloons read “He said ‘Bush’, heh heh,” and “He said ‘Dick’, hee hee.”

In those days I drank a lot of Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. I couldn’t tell the difference, but I could definitely tell if someone served me an off-brand. I happened to mention that I once tried to mix them. The guy with the cartoon solemnly warned me that that might not be legal.

I had completely forgotten about the following until I read it in my notes from February 23, 2000:

Brent got a call from someone from the May Company. Evidently they are considering getting new AS/400’s for both Meier & Frank and Filene’s because Dave Ostendorf told them that IBM is withdrawing support for the CISC systems.

Robinsons-May and Filene’s definitely got much faster systems, but I don’t think that M&F ever got an upgrade.

Life in and around Portland: I think that on our first visit Doug and I stayed in a Holiday Inn on the other side of the Willamette River. On later visits I think that I must have stayed somewhere closer to downtown. I ran nearly every day in those years, and I have a vivid recollection of running both through the streets of downtown Portland and in a large park along the Willamette River. I considered it very cool that the city allowed its citizens easy access to the riverfront. By contrast it was almost impossible to get from downtown Hartford to the banks of the Connecticut River on foot.

My memories of running in Portland are vivid and diverse, but I cannot remember being in a single restaurant or any other kind of store there. I think that I might have purchased lunch from a food truck or from a kiosk in the beautiful Pioneer Square, which was right across the street from M&F. I often saw a human statue there—a guy with silver clothes and makeup who posed in the square. In the above photo he is taking a break. I could not imagine a worse job than his.

Here are some tidbits that I wrote on June 12, 2000:

I often see strange things on the streets of Portland. Tuesday a pit bull was chained to a parking meter. It had a stick in its mouth. A guy was playing the “Lone Ranger” part of the overture from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a mandolin.
Someone from Salem Oregon stole over 300 lawn ornaments and decorated her lawn with them. She had hit houses in five counties.

I could park my rental car all day at a surface parking lot near the M&F store for a reasonable price if I arrived before the stores opened, which I always did. I also remember a building that had a huge octopus atop its front door, but I do not remember what was inside.

On the last few trips to M&F I stayed at a Homewood Suites hotel in Vancouver, WA. I selected it because it served free breakfasts and because it was fun to run along the mighty Columbia River.

The drive from the Homewood Suites to the M&F building, which was less than ten miles, was mostly on I5 and ordinarily took me only about fifteen minutes. If there was heavy traffic or an accident it might take twenty minutes, but I am pretty certain that I never spent as much as a half hour on the trip.

I remember that one of those evening runs was shortly after my tendinitis of the IT band had been diagnosed, and I had begun the prescribed exercise regimen. This outing was the first time that I had really tested how my knee had responded to the therapy.

I had to stop a couple of times because of the pain, but a thirty-second stretch allowed me to resume running. This was very encouraging to me because it indicated that the doctor’s diagnosis was accurate.

Epilogue: The M&F advertising department used AdDept up until 2002, at which time the division was folded into the Robinsons-May division of the May Co. The stores still carried the M&F logo until 2006.

The flagship store in Portland, which at the time carried the Macy’s logo, was closed in 2017. The structure is still relatively intact in 2022. The developers have posted a web page that describes its current state. You can view it here.

The principal occupant is a luxury hotel called The Nines, but several other businesses are located.there including a Japanese store called Muji.

1. Brent Stapleton’s LinkedIn page is here.

2. Dori Tierney’s Facebook page is here. When I looked she had three times as many friends as I had.

3. Sheila Wilson returned to Hecht’s after M&F was folded into Rob-May and then worked at Marshall Fields/Macy’s in Minneapolis. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. My Fred Meyer adventures are chronicled here.

5. Emily White-Keating also appears in the entry on Macy’s West. Her LinkedIn page is here.

6. Laura Rutenis also returned to Hecht’s. Her LinkedIn page is here.

1994-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Kaufmann’s

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Mike

May Co. department store chain based in Pittsburgh. Continue reading →

Kaufmann’s was a department-store division of the May Company. Its headquarters was in downtown Pittsburgh. It had stores throughout Pennsylvania and neighboring states. TSI was contacted in the spring of 1994 by Mary Ann Brown¹, Kaufmann’s Advertising Director. I think that she probably heard of us from someone at either Hecht’s or Foley’s.

In May of 1994 Sue and I drove to Pittsburgh to meet with her. We made the trip by car primarily because we had very little money at the time. We also had scheduled a meeting in the same city with an ad agency, Blattner/Brunner Inc. That meeting and our subsequent visit to the Pittsburgh Zoo has been described here.

Our appointment at Kaufmann’s was scheduled for late in the afternoon, 5:00 as I remember it. We left Enfield fairly early in the morning. Sue, who in those days was famous for her lead foot, did most of the driving. We arrived at the outskirts of Pittsburgh about thirty minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting. At that point we encountered extremely heavy traffic. We were in unfamiliar territory, and, of course, cell phones were still a few years away. So, we arrived a few minutes late.

The beginning of the meeting was rather tense. Mary Ann demanded to know why we were late and why we did not call to tell her we were going to be late. If TSI had not already developed a reputation for good work at Hecht’s and Foley’s, I think that she might have told us to reschedule or to forget about it.

Eventually she got down to business and informed us that the people in her department had developed a system for administering the department’s projects. They were satisfied with what it produced. However, they knew that it would not work in the twenty-first century, and they needed to make a decision about whether to rewrite it or replace it. I guaranteed her that AdDept would have no difficulty with the Y2K issue and explained how AdDept’s approach of a multi-user relational database worked. I do not remember meeting anyone else that day.

Sue and I stayed throughout the visit at a Holiday Inn (if my memory is accurate) a few miles north of downtown. We probably presented a demo at IBM the next day, but, if so, I don’t remember it. My recollection is that the entire event was amicable but not decisive.

For years Doug Pease, TSI’s sales person, stayed in frequent contact with Kaufmann’s. I think that Mary Ann must have spent the time arranging funding. My memory of the next trip to Pittsburgh centers around my meeting with René Conrad² (female), who was the department’s Planning Manager, and John Borman³, who managed the department’s networks and its computer hardware. I don’t know if we had a signed contract yet, but by then they were definitely committed to installing AdDept. In fact the installation did not take place until May of 1998.

I had only limited contact with Mary Ann thereafter. I do remember that she joined René and me for lunch once, and she disclosed that she had for a very short time been (or at least had applied to be) an FBI agent. That was, to say the least, a surprising bit of news.

My first memory of René was her presentation to me of an absolutely enormous D-ring binder with a black cover. Collected therein were samples of all of the reports that they needed. She spent the rest of the day answering questions about the selection criteria and the precise definition of the contents of each column of each report. The bad news was that very few of the reports matched up closely with work that we had already done. The good news was that the design document that resulted from the meeting came closer to meeting the client’s expectation than any that we had produced or would produce later. René was our liaison at Kaufmann’s from the beginning all the way to the end, and she was a very good one.

John, René, and TSI programmer Steve Shaw in a training session in Enfield.

I did not need to spend much time with John. Once their new AS/400 was connected to their network, and I explained that the demand for bandwidth would be minimal since the system was totally text-based, he was satisfied. He took charge of getting the necessary software installed on Macs and PCs, and he connected the AS/400 to the department’s network.

I remember two experiences involving credit and debit cards on trips to Pittsburgh. In those days we kept our cash at Bank of America. The best thing about that was that if I needed cash on a trip I could almost always find a local branch with an ATM. I remember that once I used such a machine at the airport and forgot to reclaim my card when I was finished obtaining the cash. I don’t know what happened to the card after that, but nobody else ever tried to use it.

For my first couple of installation and support trips, Kaufmann’s asked me to stay at the William Penn Hotel, which was only a block or so from Kaufmann’s. I sometimes arrived in Pittsburgh late in the evening. On one of those occasions some sort of event must have been going on downtown. In the lobby of the William Penn there were unexpected lines of people waiting to check in. In those days it was possible to make a hotel reservation without providing a credit card number. Several people in line had discovered that doing so did not mean that a room would necessarily be available when they arrived. There were a lot of angry people there that evening. Fortunately, I had already heard about this problem, which had been perfectly explained by Jerry Seinfeld with regard to rental cars. You can listen to it here.

The gilded clock on the corner of Fifth Ave. and Smithfield St. is still a landmark.

I usually brought an unusually large bright-blue suitcase with me to Pittsburgh. Because I sometimes had trouble sleeping when I traveled I often include the foam rubber pillow that I found much more comfortable than the soft feather pillows that old stately hotels favored. One day after working at Kaufmann’s I was unable to find the pillow in my hotel room. Evidently the maid had confiscated it. I complained at the desk, and they eventually located it and returned to me.

It was nice having such an identifiable suitcase. On an early-morning US Airways flight on July 25, 1999, from Bradley to the Pittsburgh airport that served as a hub. I was the only passenger who checked a bag to Pittsburgh. I went to the carousel listed for my flight. No bags ever appeared. I was worried that the bag had not been removed from the plane. Here is what I wrote about the incident in my notes:

When I got into Pittsburgh, my bag was missing. I went to the baggage office. They had no record of my bag. I had seen them put it on the plane and take it off. I told her [the baggage agent] so. She went to look for it and found it. She said the tag had come off. I can’t imagine how this happened. But guess what. I didn’t get angry through any of this.

While staying at at the William Penn I experienced one of the worst incidents that I ever encountered in my trips to see clients or prospects. I was suffering from the only disease that I contracted in all the years that I traveled extensively. Throughout the visit I was constantly running a low-grade fever and had a few other annoying but not debilitating symptoms. I soldiered on, and I somehow got everything accomplished that was on my list. When I returned home I went to my doctor, Victor Sonnen⁴. He gave me a blood test and eventually diagnosed the problem as a urinary infection. Some antibiotics knocked it out.

I did not really like staying at the William Penn. I could get to Kaufmann’s in two minutes, but this was not a great advantage from my perspective. I was always up early, and there was nowhere very close that served breakfast. I could eat in the hotel, but I have always found that hotel food was not very good and terribly overpriced. The evening meals posed a similar problem. I won’t go to a swanky place by myself. The only restaurant within walking distance that I liked was a Chinese takeout place.

In later years I stayed at a Hampton Inn in the Greentree section of town on the south side of the Ohio River. I loved the free breakfast bars at Hampton Inns, and this one sometimes served tasty snacks such as pizza or chicken wings that were good enough to serve as a supper in the evening. The only drawback was that there was nowhere that was reasonably flat to go for a jog. If you live in Pittsburgh, you must learn to like hills.

On two occasions I went to supper with René and her assistant, Maggie Pratt⁵. Since they both took the bus to work, I drove us in my rental car. They directed me to small restaurants that they knew near the University of Pittsburgh. I don’t remember the food that well, but I do remember that dining alone on the road is not a hard habit to break.

One thing that I remember clearly was that René suffered from migraine headaches. When she got one she still tried to work, but it was obvious that she was in considerable torment.

René volunteered as an usher at the Pittsburgh Opera. In the 1999-2000 season Verdi’s La Traviata was performed. In the last act the heroine, Violetta, who has been suffering from consumption (tuberculosis) dies. René did not like this part of the opera at all. It seemed to long to her: “She should just die and get it over with!” I did not dispute this assessment, but I find parts of other operas to be much more tedious.

Luxury apartments occupy most of the upper floors of Kaufmann’s flagship store now. Target is scheduled to open a store on one or two low floors. There is now a skating rink on the roof!

Kaufmann’s advertising department was on one of the top floors of the flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. The most peculiar thing about it became evident when one needed to use the men’s room. One was located on the same floor as the advertising department, but the only way to reach it was to walk through the beauty salon. I did not feel at all comfortable doing that. Therefore, I took the escalator up to the top floor, the home of the bakery. This restroom was a little farther away, but I found the atmosphere much more pleasant.

Everyone at TSI worked very hard on the programming projects for Kaufmann’s. The people there were uniformly supportive, and everyone seemed pretty good at what they did. I am embarrassed to say that I don’t remember the names of any of the media managers. The name Debi Katich is in my notes from 1999. I think that she was the Direct Mail Manager, but I may be wrong.

I do not remember the name of the Senior VP (Mary Ann’s boss) at the time of the installation. As I recall, he let Mary Ann pretty much run things. I definitely do remember the name of his replacement in 1999, Jack Mullen⁶, who had been Doug’s boss (or maybe his boss’s boss) at G. Fox in Hartford.

I also do not remember too many details of the code that we provided for them. The detail about newspaper ads that I recall most clearly is that the store’s contract with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette provided for significant discounts if they ran several full-page ads in the same issue. It was like buying two-liter bottles of Coke or Pepsi. The first three ads might cost $X but once the fourth ad was ordered, the price on all of them changed to $Y for all four ads. This was not easy to code because individual ads could be added, deleted, or moved (to another date) at any time. Also, the size could change. Any of these events could change the rate for all the other full-page ads in the paper that day. Not only did the rates and costs for all the affected ads need to be changed, but history records were also necessary.

Kaufmann’s used AdDept for keeping track of all of its advertising. They even uploaded their broadcast buys from the SmartPlus system that they used.

In 2000 Kaufmann’s was an enthusiastic supporter of the implementation of the A^xN project. Several people offered the opinion that the newspapers would never pay for subscribing to the service. Mary Ann did not agree. She said, “They’ll subscribe if we tell them to.” I visited three of Kaufmann’s largest papers to explain what we planned to do and to solicit suggestions. When I mentioned that I was meeting with the IT director at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, John Borman confided to me, “I want his job.”

In 2002, the Kaufmann’s stores’ Pittsburgh business headquarters closed, and its back-office operations were consolidated into those of Filene’s Department Stores in Boston. The consolidation was probably inevitable, but everyone at TSI would have greatly preferred for the new managing entity to be located in Pittsburgh.

1. In 1921 Mary Ann Brown is the Administrative Manager at her alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh. Her LinkedIn page is here. I don’t know why she left her role at Kaufmann’s off of her résumé.

2. René Conrad’s LinkedIn page is here. After the May Company folded the Kaufmann’s division into Filene’s in 2002 I tried to get René to work for TSI. She was interested enough to pay us a visit in East Windsor, but she turned down our offer. Instead she went to work for a theatrical company in an administrative role. We stayed in touch for a few years, but I had not heard from her for more than a decade. However, she recently sent me an email in which she confessed that she owed me a book.

3. John Borman’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Dr. Sonnen died in 2010 at the age of 96. He was certainly in his eighties when he treated me. His obituary is posted here.

5. I am pretty sure that Maggie Pratt’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Jack Mullen’s LinkedIn page is here.

1986-2005 TSI: Marketing Employees

Posted on June 18, 2021 by Mike

TSI’s salesmen. Continue reading →

By the mid-eighties Sue and I really needed help with marketing. We had some good products to sell, and our service was fantastic. However, our salesmanship was poor. I could often persuade people that I could develop a solution to a difficult problem, but I was not very good at persuading them that TSI’s product and approach were better than those of our competitors.

The first person whom we engaged to represent us was Joe Danko, who lived on Cape Cod. At first the relationship was on a commission-only basis. Later we considered hiring him as our salesman, but we decided against it. The details are described here. Joe was never actually an employee, and we never paid him for his services. I don’t know how much effort, if any, he put in on our behalf.

Trust me; Paul was nothing like this guy.

We hired some consultants to help us. They, in turn, hired a graduate student named Paul Schrenker, to sit in Sue’s office in Rockville when she was on the road. We provided a list of presidents of ad agencies and their phone numbers. In only a few cases was it a direct line, but, even so, quite a few people agreed to talk with him. Ad agency executives were all about relationships. Whether Paul was a potential client or a potential vendor did not matter that much; many agency heads were always on the lookout for connections. So, a surprising number of advertising executives accepted a cold call from a graduate student who knew a lot about biology but very little about any aspect of the business world.

The Patriots debacle was not O&P’s finest hour.

One of the ad agencies, O’Neal & Prelle in Hartford, agreed to an appointment, and we eventually closed the sale. Paul did not participate in closing the sale, but he did make the first appointment.

TSI severed its relationship with the consulting firm. We decided instead to hire a full-time salesman, and we approached it in the same way we had recruited programmers and administrative people—by placing an ad in the newspapers. I think that we interviewed a couple of people. One stood out, Michael Symolon. He seemed excited about the job, and he was quite well-spoken. He was a graduate of Central Connecticut. He had worked in marketing for five years at Triad Systems, a company that specialized in software for dentists.

I think that we hired Michael at some point in 1987. His LinkedIn page, which can be found here, was no help in this determination. Although he included previous and subsequent employers, he left TSI off of his list of experiences. We paid him a pretty good salary as well as commissions.

I remember that when he first began to work at TSI Michael was gung ho about setting up a nationwide sales organization. He advised me to schedule annual trips to exciting destinations exclusively for the most productive reps of our software systems.

This attitude shocked me a little, but he eventually revised his expectations when he discovered how complicated the GrandAd product was. Our competitors could undercut us on price on the hardware, and there was not much that we could do about it. The key to selling was almost always our willingness to customize the system for the prospective client. The idea of setting up a network of sales agents seemed unworkable to me. If I could not deal with the people personally, how could I assess what changes were necessary and feasible?

We gave Michael room to be creative in his approaches, but I was not ready to discuss how to celebrate sales generated by imaginary salesmen.

Terri Provost left the company shortly after Michael was hired. Michael interviewed and hired Linda Fieldhouse to take her place as administrative assistant/bookkeeper. Both of them are described here. Michael assured me that Linda was “at least a nine and a half.”

I am pretty sure that Michael and I went on a couple of ad agency sales calls together. I remember driving up to Vermont with someone—it probably was Michael. When I got out of the car I realized that I was wearing the pants for my pin-stripe suit with my blue blazer. We did not get the sale, but I don’t think that my fashion faux pas was the cause. Vermont is not known for haute couture.

I also remember that Michael accompanied me to Keiler Advertising once. Evidently he had once dated Shelly, who at that time was in charge of bookkeeping there. Michael was very embarrassed by the incident. I did not ask him for historical details.

I don’t remember him closing sales of any new GrandAd clients.

We took Amtrak from Hartford’s Union Station to NYC.

Michael also came to New York City with me for at least one very important presentation to Macy’s in 1988. He was almost a hero, as is described here.

Michael invited Sue and me to supper one evening at his house in Farmington. We got to meet his wife and kids. It was a very nice house, but I don’t remember any details.

I am sorry to report that Michael was at the center of TSI’s first great crisis, which is described here.

I ran into Michael at Bradley International one day in late 1988. He told me that he was working for a company that sold advertising software to magazines. I told him that Macy’s had finally signed the contract, that I had been working my tail off to get all the software written and installed, and that TSI would send him his commission check as soon as we got the final check from Macy’s. There did not seem to be any hard feelings.

For a couple of years TSI muddled along without a salesman and with very little effort at marketing. Those were very difficult years in a number of ways. By the spring of 1991 the AdDept system had two pretty substantial accounts, and we felt that it was time to start marketing it seriously nationwide.

Meanwhile, our ad agency clients seemed perfectly content with their current hardware and showed no interest in converting to the AS/400, the system that IBM had introduced in 1988. It is described here.

We hired a young man named Tom Moran to help with marketing. He was a very nice guy, but he knew next to nothing about computers, advertising, retail, or, for that matter, marketing. He was definitely eager to learn, and he was willing to follow up on leads, which was the most important thing. Plus, both Sue and I liked him.

I remember going on two trips with Tom. The first was for a meeting with Hecht’s in Arlington, VA. Sue, Tom, and I drove down to the Washington area. A Motel 6 on the Maryland side of DC kept the light on for us, and I am happy to report that no murders were committed (or at least none reported) there that night. It was the first and last time that I stayed at a Motel 6.

The three of us met with Barbara Shane Jackson, who was in charge of Hecht’s patchwork PC system and her boss, the advertising director, whose name I don’t remember. Tom did not contribute much, but it was a good meeting on the whole. In the end we got the Hecht’s account.

The RAC was held at the Hilton in downtown Chicago.

Tom and I also attended RAC, the Retail Advertising Conference, in Chicago. It was a huge pain to get everything prepared for our booth there. We had to rent an AS/400 from IBM and to hire union employees to set everything up. Nevertheless, we did manage to get our demo computer system working by the time that the attendees came to visit the vendor area.

Some vendors who were familiar to us were there. Camex, the company from Boston that specialized in programming and selling heavy-duty Sun workstations for the production of ads, had an exhibit that was ten times as large as ours and had a dozen or more people. Tapscan, the broadcast software company. was right across the aisle from our booth. One young lady who worked there must have accidentally left her skirt at home. It appeared that over her black pantyhose and high heels, she was wearing a wash cloth that she purloined from her hotel room.

Most of the conventioneers were drunk or at least tipsy by the time that they reached our area. We made one contact with the ad director of Hess’s, a department store chain with headquarters in Pennsylvania. Tom gave him a copy of our sales materials and got all of his contact information. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we had begun correspondence with him, Hess’s was acquired by another retailer, and his position was eliminated.

The convention would have been a complete fiasco except for two things. The first was that I got to introduce Tom to the indescribable pleasure of Italian beef sandwiches purchased from street vendors in the Windy City.

The other redeeming event was the appointment that I had made to do a demo at the convention for Val Walser, the Director of the Advertising Business Office at The Bon Marché, a department store chain in the northwest. The programs worked without a hitch, and she was very impressed with what the system could do. She even invited us out to Seattle for a presentation to the relevant parties at the IBM office there.

Tom accompanied me on that trip, too. Our plane landed in Seattle very late, well after midnight. We checked into our hotel, but we only managed to get a couple of hours sleep. We went to the IBM office, where I checked that all of the software was working correctly. By this time I had been chain-drinking coffee for several hours, and still I felt very sleepy. This was an important presentation, and I had to be at my best.

The demo seemed to go pretty well. Everyone was attentive. The people from the IT department were asking tough questions, which usually boded well for us. I was so tired that I could barely concentrate. As we were putting away our materials I realized that I had been drinking decaffeinated coffee all day.

Nevertheless, I convinced Val and the other important parties. We put together a hardware and software proposal, and they submitted a requisition to the IT department, which also approved it. However, the powers that be at Federated Department Stores¹, the mother ship, vetoed it.

This episode taught me that TSI needed someone who could navigate his way through the bureaucratic structure to find out what the hold-up was. Tom was not ready for this kind of responsibility. In the end, we decided that we could not afford someone who just tagged along for demos. In fact, we were really in the position where we could not afford anything.

Fortunately, we were able to use the Hecht’s installation as an entrée into the May Company, which at the time had about ten divisions. Not long after that I persuaded Foley’s in Houston to install the system, too. I also convinced Neiman Marcus in Dallas to get the system.

Those sales gave TSI both a solid base of accounts and enough revenue that we again looked for a marketing person in 1993. We found what we were looking for in Doug Pease, who had actually worked in the advertising department at G. Fox, the local May Company chain.

At first I had hoped that Doug could do some of the demos, but I soon gave up on that idea. I knew exactly what the system did, what it could potentially do, and what was beyond us. The programmers were generating a lot of code every week, and so these lists were in a constant state of flux. Besides, I had a great deal of experience at public speaking, and Doug did not. I don’t think that I would ever have trusted anyone with the demos.

Doug was a real bulldog once he had a hot lead. He was extremely good at following up on everything. In his first year we closed extremely profitable sales to Lord & Taylor, Filene’s Basement, and Michaels Stores.

In April of 1994 I received an email from a woman named Susan Sikorski, who worked at Ross Roy Communications, Inc. in Bloomfield Hills, MI. The company at the time had eight hundred employees (!) and seven satellite offices. They wanted a production billing system that would feed their Software 2000 accounting system and some internally developed applications.

A few years earlier I would have considered this opportunity a godsend. We had already written interfaces for Software 2000 accounting systems for two AdDept clients. We loved to do interfaces, and the more complicated they were the better. However, we were so busy with programming for clients that Doug had landed that this was my response:

Unfortunately, as I looked over your package, I realized that our system does not really measure up to your requirements. We would have to make very substantial modifications to meet even the minimal requirements. Since we specialize in custom programming, this would not ordinarily be a great issue to us, but at this time we would not even be able to schedule the work for many months. So, I guess that we will have to mass.

And it was almost certainly a good thing that I was forced to make that decision. In 1995 Ross Roy Communications was purchased by the mega-agency called Omnicom Group. If TSI had been chosen for the project, I strongly suspect that the plug would have been pulled on it before the system became fully operational. Susan found a new job at Volkswagen in 1996.

Meanwhile, in the next few years Doug managed to get TSI’s AdDept system into all of the remaining May Company divisions, as well as Elder-Beerman, the Bon-Ton, Stage Stores, two Tandy divisions, Gottschalks in California, and all but one of the five divisions of Proffitt’s Inc., which later became Saks Inc..

Doug and I took many sales trips together. The most memorable one was in December of 1997 to Honolulu to pitch Liberty House³, the largest retailer on the islands.

Doug using a client’s AS/400 for something.

We had a little free time while we were there. Doug and I used it to climb to the top of Diamond Head together. He was an enthusiastic mountain biker, he had been a soccer player in college, and he was quite a bit younger than I was. I was in pretty good shape from jogging. So, neither of us held up the other.

Sue accompanied us to Honolulu, and after Doug returned home, she and I had a great time on four different islands, as is described here.

The other trip that was the most memorable for me was when we flew to Fresno, CA, to pitch Gottschalks, a chain of department stores in the central valley.

In those days you could save a lot of money by flying on Saturday rather than Sunday—more than enough to pay for a day’s food and lodging and a car rental. Doug and I considered going to Yosemite on our free day, but there was a problem with the roads there. Instead we decided to drive along the coastal highway from north to south to maximize our views of the coastline.

I did not have a camera, but Doug did. His was a real camera of some sort. I was not yet into photography, and I had not brought a disposable camera on the trip. Doug took lots of photos. In fact, he ran out of film. When we stopped for lunch he bought some more film.

Doug took a lot more photos on the rest of the journey, or so he thought. When we got to Fresno he discovered that he had no photos at all after lunch. I don’t remember whether he forgot to load the camera after he took out the film. Maybe he did not wind it, or there was a technical problem. That was not the worst of it. He also somehow lost the first roll of film when we stopped for lunch, and it also contained the photos of his newborn child taken before we left.

But, hey, we got the account.

I guess that Doug is unloading new equipment in Enfield.

Doug and I almost never disagreed about what the company should be doing. However, near the end of his tenure he came up with an idea that I just could not sanction. He wanted us to start a new line of business in which we contracted for large chunks of advertising space from newspapers at a discount and then resold it to small businesses at a profit. Maybe he could have sold a lot of space; maybe he couldn’t. In any case such an undertaking would leverage no TSI products or services and none of the skills that the rest of us possessed. In short, he was asking me to backstop a new source of revenue for him. I declined to do so.

Doug and I made a great team. I gathered specs and did the demos. He attended, met the players, and subsequently followed up on everything. When the prospect had signed the contract, he made sure that all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed and ordered the hardware if they bought from TSI or a business partner.⁴ By 1999 we had more work than the programmers and I could handle. I told him to stop selling new software systems until the programming backlog could be reduced to a more manageable level, which would not be for at least a year. He made the imminently reasonable decision to look for another job.

After TSI moved to East Windsor in late 1999, we hired one more AdDept salesman, Jim Lowe. His previous experience was with a company that marketed hard cider. The challenge was to get retailers to give them adequate shelf space. It was retail experience, but not exactly the kind that we had dealt with.

Jim was a smart guy, and he could have been a good salesman for us. We went on a trip together to Wherehouse Music in Torrance, CA. Wherehouse was a large chain of music stores in California. Jim and I stayed in a nearby Holiday Inn the first night. We used MapQuest to find to the Wherehouse headquarters the next morning. At the very first turn MapQuest advised us to turn right. This seemed wrong to me, and I turned left instead. We reached the building in less than ten minutes. I don’t know when we would have arrived if I had turned right.

It was a very strange meeting. Rusty Hansen, whom I knew from Robinsons-May, had told them about us. We never got to meet with him or anyone else who seemed to know what they wanted. We did get to meet the president of the company, who was wearing jeans and a tee shirt. I never did figure out what this whole episode was about. The company went out of business within a couple of years.

Jim only worked for us for a few months. He took an offer that was very similar to his old job. Before he left he helped me with a mailing that produced some good leads. I sold the last few AdDept systems to some of those retailers by myself.

Jim’s advice to me when he left was that TSI should concentrate on A^xN, which is described here. I don’t think that he ever really understood that the horse must precede the cart. We needed retailers to be sending us insertion orders in order to be able to send them to newspapers.

Bob Wroblewski was, as I recall, a relative of Denise’s husband. In November of 2003 Denise came up with the idea of paying Bob to get the newspapers signed up.

I got to know Bob on a trip taken by the two of us to California to persuade Rob-May and Gottschalks to use A^xN. We both misjudged how well the two demos went. The people at Gottschalks seemed excited; Rob-May was somewhat cool. However, Rob-May soon came around, and I never did persuade Stephanie at Gottschalks to use A^xN.

Here is how the marketing process worked. After a retailer’s advertising department that scheduled its newspaper ads in AdDept agreed to use A^xN for insertion orders, it provided us with a list of its newspapers with contact information. I wrote a letter to each paper asking them to subscribe to the service. The letter was printed on the retailer’s letterhead and was signed by the advertising director or ROP manager at the newspaper. However, it was sent by us along with a contract that I had signed. The monthly rate was approximately what the newspaper charged for one column inch in one issue. This was a negligible fraction of what the advertiser spent. Then Bob called each one and persuaded them to sign up.

I don’t know (and I don’t want to know) what Bob said to the papers, but he had a very high success rate. He also earned quite a bit for himself in commissions. At one time we had over four hundred newspapers that subscribed for the service!

Bob’s wife died while he was still working with us. I drove to Providence, which is where he lived, for the wake.

1. Federated Department Stores owned many large chains that were all very promising potential AdDept clients. The rejection of The Bon Marché’s request may have been a blessing in disguise. In January of 1990, shortly after this meeting, Federated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It could have been really ugly.

2. Susan Sikorski is apparently working as a consultant for Avaya in 2021. She is featured as a graduate of Wayne State on this webpage.

3. We learned later that the advertising department at Liberty House had approved the purchase of the AdDept system, but the order was never placed because in March of 1998 Liberty House filed for Chapter 11, and the funds for new systems were frozen.

4. TSI was throughout its existence a certified member of IBM’s Business Partner program. However, because of the size of the company we were bit allowed to sell IBM hardware directly. Instead, we needed to pair up with a “managing Business Partner” who actually could place orders. We dealt extensively with several of these companies—Rich Baran, BPS, Savoir, and Avnet. There may have been others.

1994 TSI: The Second Crisis

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Mike

The I in TSI comes to stand for Incorporated. Continue reading →

This entry requires quite a bit of background.

When we were still living in Detroit, Sue Comparetto founded TSI Tailored Systems as sole proprietor. I helped her occasionally in the early days, but for the most part she did it alone. She never had any employees or, as far as I know, a business plan. She inherited a handful of accounts from her former employer. At first she had an office in Highland Park, a small and dangerous city surrounded by Detroit. Then, when TSI somehow obtained an IBM 5120 computer, she set up shop in the spare room in our house in Detroit.

Having the computer in Detroit allowed me to learn BASIC. Having access to the programs and listings from AIS, the company that wrote most of the software that Sue supported, allowed me to learn how business programs could be structured. We were self-taught. I had taken exactly one college-level programming class at Michigan in 1966¹; Sue had none. Neither of us had ever taken an accounting or marketing class. In fact, neither of us had ever even sold or helped market anything.

When we moved back to Connecticut, Sue registered TSI as a partnership. We worked together, but we never really agreed on who was responsible for what. I considered myself much better at programming than Sue was. I therefore expected to do the bulk of the coding (including software for TSI to use) and for her to handle nearly everything else. The way I thought of this was: she does the phone stuff; I do the computer stuff.

The first additional task that I felt obliged to take over was marketing. In Detroit Sue had never needed to find new clients. She was given a bunch of them, and she hoped that IBM would provide her with additional leads. When we moved back to Connecticut, however, we lost the ties with the Detroit IBM office, and it was difficult to make new arrangements. We had only a few clients and lousy credentials.

I copied company names and addresses from the Yellow Pages.

We scrambled to get a few custom programming jobs. I did nearly all the design, coding, implementation, and training. I pulled together a mailing list from phone books at the library and wrote letters to businesses that I thought might be interested in systems designed for our clients. We never made a lot of money this way, but it did generate some business. Eventually, IBM also gave us some leads.

We hired a receptionist/bookkeeper, Debbie Priola, and a programmer, Denise Bessette. The former freed up time for Sue almost immediately. The latter consumed quite a bit of my time for a couple of months, but eventually she helped a lot. Unfortunately, she decided to return to college and cut back on her hours at TSI. More details about the early years of TSI can be read here.

Both Sue and I found most of the decade of the eighties to be enjoyable but frustrating. The programming was fun and very challenging. Almost all of TSI’s customers appreciated our approach. However, we never came up with a good way of monetizing our efforts. The ad agency system, GrandAd, did better than the “anything for a buck” approach that we had been forced to use in the beginning. However, our market was effectively limited to agencies that were within driving distance and were too large for a PC system. In that reduced market, it was difficult to make enough sales to get by. Eventually there were so few reasonable prospects remaining that a change in strategy was essential.

I was convinced that our future lay in selling AdDept to large retail advertisers across the country. There was no real competition, and there seemed to be a good number of prospects.

I don’t think that Sue agreed with this change in focus. She had always favored local businesses over large corporations when purchasing something, and I am pretty sure that she also preferred dealing with smaller businesses over dealing with corporate executives. The fact that both of our first two AdDept clients declared bankruptcy and left us with tens of thousands of dollars of noncollectable invoices reinforced her attitude.

Sue had always been a night person. I was the opposite. I always was out of bed by 5AM or earlier. I usually became very sleepy around 9:30PM. I then took a shower and read a few pages of a book in bed. I was almost always asleep within a minute or two of turning off the lights. I stuck to this routine for decades, and I still do in 2021.

At some point in the eighties Sue developed a sleeping problem. She liked to watch late-night television, but she almost always dozed off in her chair. She slept very fitfully, waking up with a start and then falling back asleep. This went on for a long time—months, maybe years. Finally she went to a doctor. He prescribed a sleep study. It was not a surprise that it confirmed that she had sleep apnea. For reasons that I have never understood Sue was reluctant to purchase and then use the sleep machine. The models sold in those days were big, expensive, and ungainly. Even so, breathing well while sleeping is critical to good health.

I suspect strongly that this long period in which she was not getting enough oxygen when she slept impaired her performance at work and elsewhere. She regularly came in to the office late—very late. She was late for appointments. She missed appointments all together. The books were never closed on time. She repeatedly put off providing the accountant with tax information, even though the company’s operation was not a bit complicated. There were many other issues, but the worst thing, from my perspective, was that she made employees call the people with whom she had appointments in order to make excuses for her.

To the best of my knowledge none of the people whom I listed relapsed even once.

In 1987 or 1988 Sue gave up smoking. At almost exactly the same time, Denise did, too. So did Patti Corcoran, Sue’s best friend, and, halfway across the country, my dad. This was like a dream come true for me. I had never taken a puff, but for years I had worked in smoky offices and had taken Excedrin for headaches. When TSI’s office was declared smoke-free, my headaches went away forthwith, and they never returned.

Sue, in contrast, had a very difficult time quitting. She put on quite a bit of weight, which amplified the sleep apnea problem. She was also more irritable at work and at home.

I must mention one other factor: Sue never throws anything away. Okay, if it has mold on it, or it is starting to stink, she will discard it. Otherwise she stuffs things for which she has no immediate use in bags or boxes.

When I first met Sue, she was renting one room in the basement of someone’s house. It was not cluttered at all. She seemed to have no possessions except a water bed, a record player, and a few albums. By the early nineties we had a house of our own with two rooms that had no assigned function, a garage, an attic, and a full basement. All of them soon became full of junk. Both of our cars had to park outside because the garage was wall-to-wall miscellany.

TSI’s headquarters in Enfield was nearly as bad. Sue’s very large office was the worst. Strewn about were boxes and paper sacks full of correspondence and memorabilia. Her desk was always completely covered, and post-it notes were everywhere.

In the rest of the office stood several file cabinets. Of course, every business must retain records, and one never knew when the company might get audited. It was also critically important to maintain good records about contacts with clients and prospects, and our business, in particular, needed up-to-date listings of programs, which we had by the thousands. So, we had a lot of important paperwork.

No more mainframe announcements, please.

However, in TSI’s office could be found many other things, which by any measure were totally useless. One day I undertook to throw away the announcements that we constantly received from IBM about its products. These documents formed a stack about four feet high. 90 percent of these missives were about mainframe products. There was absolutely no chance that we would ever work with any of these machines. Even the remaining ones (all of which I intended to keep) were seldom of any value because the information might have been contradicted by a subsequent notice.

Sue asked me what I was doing, and I told her. She immediately got very upset and even started to cry. She just could not stand for anyone to make the decision to discard anything that she considered hers. I realized at that moment this was a reflection of a very serious problem. I put all the notices back in the file cabinet.²

1994: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

The business was finally taking off. Our new salesman, Doug Pease, was demonstrating that he was ideal for the job. The nationwide retail recession had ended. The retail conglomerates with money (or credit) were gobbling up smaller chains, and in most cases this worked to our advantage. We were approaching a position in which we need not ever worry about competition. Most of us were working very hard, but we were getting new clients, and it was exciting.

The problem was Sue. She was hardly involved in any of this at all. Her behavior was becoming really unprofessional. Doug complained about her often. She kept hiring assistants, and they kept quitting. I could not find out where we stood financially because our books were so out of date.

On a couple of occasions I was stretched so thin that I asked Sue to take trips to clients for me. I did not think that technical expertise would be involved. I just needed someone to find out what the users needed. The first one was to Macy’s East in New York. Sue never told me what happened, but the people at Macy’s told me years later that they had made voodoo dolls representing her and stuck pins in them.

The other trip was to Foley’s in Houston. Sue flew all the way there and then realized that she had brought no cash. Her credit cards had all been canceled by the issuers. Fortunately, she had a checkbook, and Beverly Ingraham, the Advertising Director at Foley’s, cashed a check for her.

In May of 1994 Sue and I took a very important road trip to Pittsburgh. We met with Blattner/Brunner, an ad agency (described here), and Kaufmann’s, a chain of department stores (described here). Both of these sessions went quite well. When we returned to Enfield, I was required to spend a lot of time working on the proposal for Kaufmann’s. It was the most complicated and difficult one that I had ever done, and if I did not do a good job of analyzing and estimating the difficulty of each element, we could suffer for this for years.

So, I asked Sue to follow up on Blattner/Brunner while I was working on Kaufmann’s. Sue had been there for the session in Pittsburgh. There was no one else I could turn to. She completely fumbled the ball. I was quite angry, but I knew that it would do no good to nag her about it.

On the other hand, I appreciated the fact that she was the founder of the company. These opportunities never would have happened if she had not started the ball rolling back in Detroit.

The day finally came when I just could not take it any more. I told her to go home and not to come in to work any more. There was no argument and no tears. She told me that I was making a big mistake and just left.

No one else thought that it was a mistake.

Within a day or so I approached Sue with the following arrangement: TSI Tailored Systems Inc. would be registered as a Chapter C corporation.

I would be president and have 55 percent of the stock, and Sue would would be treasurer with 45 percent. We would hire a new accountant to handle the corporation, and the bookkeeper would report to me. It would be my responsibility to make sure that the books were closed on time, and the taxes were paid on time. I would also do our personal taxes. We would fund the corporation with the difference between our accounts receivable and our accounts payable. If it needed cash (as it did a few times), I would loan as much as necessary to the corporation at a reasonable interest rate.

Sue was not happy about it, but she agreed to this. She did not even argue about the salary amounts that I set.

Our new accountant’s name was Sal Rossitto². He guided us through the transition. He advised us to set up an Limited Liability Company³, but I insisted on a true corporate entity that issued stock to its owners.

Setting up the new corporation was fairly straightforward. We had to open a new bank account. I found it to be a fairly simple matter to close the books every month within a day or two of the end of the month. We also set up a 401K with matching funds, a profit-sharing plan, and a good health and disability insurance plan from Anthem. None of this was difficult.

I am not sure who took over handling of the payroll after Sue left. TSI eventually hired Paychex to do it. Denise collected the time cards from the employees and submitted the requisite forms to Paychex.

Our accountants loved our Nov. fiscal year. They could work on our taxes in a less busy season.

I made one very good decision. We set our fiscal year to run from December 1 through November 30. We paid bonuses and made contributions in November. This gave all the employees the entire month of December to spend or save for tax purposes.

Dissolving TSI was a much more complicated task. Sue and Sal met often over the course of several months to unravel issues in the partnership’s books. I remember, among other things, some kind of ugly situation with regard to sales tax in California regarding the way that the installation at Gottschalks occurred. At the end of this process Sal confided to me that he now understood why I wanted to set up a real corporation.

We also ordered new letterhead. Ken Owen worked with me on the logo. I eliminated the stripes and the lean of TSI. The color around the TSI was pure blue. The colors to the left of that block went from a very light blue gradually darker almost to pure blue. The effect worked better on the computer screen than it did when printed.

For me the most important thing was to reestablish blue as the company’s color. It started with a light blue as shown at the top of the page, but over the years it had somehow evolved into something that was more green than blue. I hated it.

The next few years were boom years for TSI. I worked my tail off, and my travel schedule was a killer. I didn’t care. We had finally turned the corner, and the future looked very bright.

Life at home, however, was very difficult. Sue was obviously unhappy. She probably thought that I intended to dump her. I still loved her; I just did not want to work with her any more. I was quite sure that the company would do better without her.

displayed no interest in finding a job. This surprised me. She had had quite a few jobs since I met her. She really liked a few of them. She could summon up a great deal of enthusiasm about new projects, and she loved meeting new people. I could think of several occupations that she would fit very well.

Instead, she leased some space in an old office building in a questionable part of downtown Springfield, MA. She then fixed it up and rented it out to dance teachers who needed a place to give lessons. I don’t know how much of our money she lost on this venture. I am not sure that she even kept records of it. She certainly didn’t ask my opinion about it.

On weekends we still drove to Wethersfield to visit our old friends, the Corcorans, regularly. That helped quite a bit.

At one point Sue awarded herself a vacation. She drove to New Orleans to see a guy that she knew from high school who was into social dancing. She stopped at some other places along the way. I never asked her about what happened on this trip. When she returned she did not offer any details.

Eventually things got a little better. After the trip to Hawaii (described here) in December 1995 the situation became more tolerable for both of. At least we had some money to spend and save for the first time ever in our relationship.

1. The course that I took as a freshman at U-M taught a programming language that was unknown outside of Ann Arbor. It was called MAD, which stood for Michigan Algorithm Decoder. We wrote our programs on 80-column punch cards.

2. Perhaps you are wondering why I gave in without an argument. It was because I recognized quite early in our relationship that Sue was expert at playing the “Why don’t you …? Yes, but …” game described by Eric Berne in his best-selling book Games People Play. A pretty good write-up of the “game” is posted here. This is also the reason that I did not press her about the sleep apnea.

2. Sal Rossitto died in 2002. His obituary is here.

3. The purpose of an LLC is to protect the “members” from being personally responsible for debts and obligations undertaken by the company, but it is not as completely separated as a true corporation.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Foley's

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

2000-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Meier & Frank

1994-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Kaufmann’s

1986-2005 TSI: Marketing Employees

1994 TSI: The Second Crisis