Tag Archives: Macy's East

1991-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Hecht’s

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

In 1991 I received what probably was the most welcome business telephone call in my life. At the time TSI had only two AdDept1 clients, Macy’s Northeast2, and P.A. Bergner & Co.3 I had recently sent to the advertising directors of several dozen other large retailers a letter that described the AdDept system and the positive effects that it had produced at its first two installations. The phone call was from Barbara Schane Jackson4 of the Hecht Company, a department store chain in the mid-Atlantic area. I did not realize it before that first call, but Hecht’s was one of the divisions of the May Company.

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

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

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

Hecht’s Ballston store.

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

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

After my demo the sale was in the bag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angus Podgorny was humanity’s last hope at Wimbledon.

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

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

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

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

Not this guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In looking through the notes I discovered two other interesting things. The first was that Hecht’s used a product called Wam!Net to deliver its ads electronically to the newspapers. The Associated Press developed a product called AdSend, which most large advertising departments used. At the time (early 2000) TSI was beginning to roll out our AxN16 product for insertion orders via the Internet, and we were contemplating using the connection that the program established to send ads as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bridge author.
Oscar winner.

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

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

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

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

16. The design of AxN is described in some detail here

1992-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Neiman Marcus

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The store with only two sales per year. Continue reading →

My recollection is that the first inquiry from Neiman Marcus came in early 1992 On the other end of the phone line was the manager of the advertising business office. Although I worked with her pretty closely for a fairly extensive period of time, I don’t remember her name.

She must have responded to a mass mailing that I sent after the installation at Hecht’s was under control. I addressed those letters to advertising directors. So, the advertising director must have given it to her. In our telephone conversation she explained to me how they did things at Neiman’s. I told her that I thought that our system could help her with some of their problems. I then sent her materials about how AdDept worked and tried to relate aspects of AdDept to Neiman’s situation.

She asked us to pay them a visit. I arranged for Sue Comparetto and me fly to Dallas to meet with the potential users and to do a demonstration for them at IBM’s local office. The business office of Neiman’s advertising department was on one of the upper floors of the company’s flagship store on Main Street.

When we arrived there I was surprised to find that the rest of the advertising department would not be involved in the discussion. Although Neiman Marcus was still using the system in 2014, I never spoke with anyone from the rest of the department. They used an advertising agency for most of their advertising, including newspaper ads. In fact, the lady that we were dealing with did not even want the rest of the department to have access to the system. She really just wanted a system to keep track of expenses and co-op.

The stores only had two sales per year— First Call in February and Last Call in August, or maybe the other way around. They used the traditional 4-5-4 retail calendar (described here) with which we were already familiar, but Neiman’s first month was August, not February.

My AdDept demo needed a major change of emphasis. I usually emphasized that the main reason for a centralized database was for everyone to take advantage of work done by others. She did not want the others involved at all. Also, the most impressive part of the demo was how quickly a newspaper ad could be scheduled. She had little interest in that task, which was the agency’s responsibility. Nevertheless, the reaction to what I showed was quite positive.

After the demo Sue and I rented a car and drove to Austin for a little R&R with Marlene Soul, one of her friends from high school. She was, if you can believe it, a consultant in feng shui, which she claimed was mostly about being organized.

Marlene took us to a comedy club in downtown Austin, which was definitely a swinging place. I also remember sitting around at her house while she tortured her cat with a long flexible semi-rigid wire that ended with a feather. The slightest twitch made the feather jump and fly.

I made a note to myself to buy one of these when I arrived back in New England so that I could use it to drive my cantankerous cat Woodrow crazy. I did, and it did. He had to hide under the couch so that he could not see it.

The following morning we went birding with Marlene and a group that met every Saturday morning. I was exceptionally bad at it. I have had poor vision since the third grate, and I have always been notoriously bad at finding things anywhere. However, this gathering did spark enough interest in me to become a little more knowledgeable in ornithology.

Upon returning to the office I spent a couple of days putting together a detailed proposal for Neiman Marcus. It did not include as much custom programming as usual. The main objective was for the AS/400 to be able to generate a file to be used by the expense payable system on the mainframe.

The business office manager accepted the proposal a short time after receiving it. I sent her a software contract, which she signed. I then ordered the hardware and system software from IBM and we received an installation date. I knew that we would not have the interface done by then, but we would need some data to test the interface anyway, and there would be no data on day one.

From our perspective this was by far the easiest sale that we had ever had, and the installation, which took place in August of 1992, also went rather smoothly. I had to spend quite a bit of time fine-tuning the coding for the incredibly complicated interface with their corporate financial system. I did not care. I loved to do that kind of work because, once it was in place, the chances of them scrapping the system were minuscule1.

People in the IT department2, however, were furious that the lady from the advertising business office had signed a contract with TSI without consulting them. They were nice enough to me, and they were quite cooperative about establishing the interface between the two systems. However, her career at Neiman Marcus did not last long after AdDept was installed and working smoothly.

The key to the success of the installation was effecting the financial interface. It involved a considerable amount of two-way communication between AdDept and the corporate mainframe. Gary Beberman, who had been TSI’s liaison for the first AdDept installation at Macy’s East (described here), was extremely effective as the go-between for TSI and the mainframe programmers.

I found this list of the steps involved in a document written in 2000:

1. A list of general ledger accounts is downloaded. AdDept’s general ledger account table is updated.
2.A list of departments with the accompanying hierarchy is downloaded. The department table and the rest of the hierarchy is updated.
3. Expenses are uploaded to the accounts payable system. The accounts payable system feeds the general ledger.
4. Co-op transactions are also uploaded to the accounts payable system. The accounts payable system feeds the general ledger.
5. General ledger transactions in the advertising accounts are downloaded at the end of the month. An AdDept program compares the downloaded transactions with the uploaded transactions. A list of exceptions is printed. Additional transactions are placed in a batch file, which can be converted to real AdDept transactions.

The walk down to Dealey Plaza is an easy one.

I made a fairly large number of visits to Dallas during the installation period. Thereafter, a few years would sometime go by between requests for visits. Here are a few memories that I have maintained of those trips.

Neiman’s flagship store at Christmas time.
  • In the nineties I spent a lot of time in the American Airlines section of the DFW airport. My favorite restaurant there was a Mexican cantina.
  • I also spent a lot of in autos driving between the airport and either Dallas or Fort Worth, where TSI had several clients. Sometimes I took a cab; usually I rented a car from Avis.
  • On my first solo trip to Neiman’s I was a little late and a little lost. I crossed Main Street in the middle of the street. A cop stopped me with every intention of giving me a ticket for jaywalking. I was polite, however, and he let me go with only a warning.
  • One of my early visits was in December during the running of the Dallas Marathon. I went out for a jog and watched some of the real runners near the finish line. This must have been on a Saturday or a Sunday.
  • The temperature on that day was around 30. I was wearing stretch leggings, shorts, a tee shirt, and a nylon jacket. Most of the real runners were wearing shorts and singlets. At Neiman’s on Monday the business manager, who was a originally from Pittsburgh, confided to me that she and her husband were concerned about whether the cold weather might harm their child if they let her play outside. She admitted that no one in Pittsburgh would have thought twice about their kids being out for hours in such weather.
  • On another occasion I walked to the State Fair grounds on a Friday evening. I was surprised to discover thousands of people celebrating Juneteenth. I had never heard of this event before.
  • One summer evening after working at Neiman’s I took a stroll down to Dealey Plaza, which is the the location of the ramp to I-35. I wanted to conduct a personal investigation of the interchange, the “grassy knoll”, the Texas Book Depository (which had been converted into a museum), and the other locations associated with the assassination. A few minutes earlier the fatal presidential motorcade had passed right by Neiman’s flagship store, which is .6 miles from the plaza.
  • One day after the system was operational the business office manager drove me to lunch for some authentic Texas barbecue. I cannot say that I was very impressed. I have never understood the idea of cooking all of the flavor out of meat just so it could be coated with barbecue sauce.
  • Neiman’s made a big deal out of Christmas. Not only did they publish their famous catalog with one outrageous gift idea, but they also sponsored an evening in which their VIP clients could shop without dealing with the riffraff. The store open that evening only to those who were sent an invitation. Each was assigned an employee to tour the store with them. I am not sure what the employees were expected to do. I looked for members of the Ewing family, but I did not see any.
  • On my visit on September 9, 2000, the temperature reached 109°. It was also the thirty-fifth day in a row with no rain. That was the day that I understood why the streets in Texas are almost all concrete, as opposed to asphalt. Anything that was paved with asphalt turned gooey when the temperature got that high.

I did not actually work with most of the subsequent Neiman’s employees enough to burn in lasting memories. I did find some notes that provided me with some information on some of them;

Jeff Netzer.
  • I was surprised to discover that many of the successors to the female business office manager mentioned above were Aggies, that is, graduates of Texas A&M. The first was Jeff Netzer3, who worked at Neiman’s from 1996-1999. He called TSI a few years later when he was employed at Sewell Automotive Company. I saw Jeff there when they invited me to assess the possibility of us designing a system for this company. This experience is described here.
  • The second Aggie was named Brian Harvey4. He worked in the advertising department from 1998-2000. I met him in 2000, but I don’t remember him.
  • After Brian’s departure the advertising business office was run by Alea Montez. I remember that she called the office for support several times. I don’t think that I ever met her.
  • The last Aggie was Brian Davis5, whose title at Neiman’s was Media Analyst. I don’t remember him at all. I don’t think that I ever met him in person.
  • A striking omission in this list is everyone in any other area of advertising. I never succeeded in interesting anyone in even considering what TSI had done for so many others in similar positions.
  • I had quite a bit of contact with a number of IT people at Neiman’s. I met a few in person, but I don’t remember any names.
  • In the 2000’s Neiman’s hired an AS/400 consultant to help them with connectivity and to upgrade their system. We had a good relationship with him, but I don’t remember his name.

1. In fact, the AdDept installation at Neiman’s lasted longer than that of any other client. Part of the explanation for that was that Neiman’s was one of the few AdDept clients that was not bought out by another company. When we closed TSI’s doors for the last time in 2014, Neiman’s was still using AdDept. For all that I know, it may have continued after that.

2 The IT people worked in a building in Las Colinas, a few miles from the flagship store in downtown Dallas. I went there a couple of times and met a few people there.

3. Jeff Netzer’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Brian Harvey’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. Brian Davis’s LinkedIn page is here.

1993-1996 TSI: AdDept-Burdines Interface

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The proverbial brass ring? Continue reading →

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

I have a great idea for a software project!

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

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

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

Gilbert’s LinkedIn Photo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1989-1993 TSI: AdDept-Camex Interface

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The first time that I ever heard the word “Camex” was when I was researching the requirements for the first installation of TSI’s AdDept system1 at Macy’s East2. One of the job titles that Macy’s used for employees assigned to production of a newspaper ad was “Camex operator”. I asked Alan Spett, a vice president at Macy’s who was our principal contact during this period, what a Camex was. Alan told me that Camex was a company in Boston that had designed and implemented software and networking for workstations from Sun Microsystems. The workstations were used by many newspapers and some of the largest newspaper advertisers to help with the design of pages to appear in newspapers.

I later did a little research on the company. It was founded in 1974 by George White and a partner whose name I never discovered. The first customer was the Boston Globe. Once that installation stabilized, the company grew dramatically by selling expensive systems (roughly $2 million each) to newspapers around the country and then to large retailers.

In 1989 the company was sold to DuPont, the chemical giant. George White stayed with the company until 1993.

Camex had a booth near TSI’s at the Retail Advertising Conference in Chicago that Tom Moran3 and I attended in 1991 or 1992. Our booth was the smallest allowed. Camex’s booth, which was near ours, was perhaps ten times larger. They must have brought twenty salesmen and lots of workstations and network servers.

Alan may have voiced an interest in creating an interface between AdDept and Camex in those early days. However, it was included in neither the original installation nor the first set of enhancements.

Dan Stroman, TSI’s contact for the AdDept installation at P.A. Bergner & Co.4, told me that Bergner’s wanted to implement an interface between AdDept and Burgner’s Camex computers. I told Dan that Macy’s might also be interested in such an interface, and I gave him Alan’s telephone number. The two of them agreed to make a joint project of the interface.

My recollection of the details is fuzzy. I think that AdDept was supposed to create a file that contained all relevant production job information for jobs in specified ad types that had not yet been released. Camex would create files for AdDept that indicated job steps had been completed on those jobs.

There were many issues to resolve.

  • What was the naming convention for jobs on Camex? That field would need to be added to the AdDept database.
  • Should AdDept require that each Camex job name be unique? If not, will uniqueness be enforced at the time of the interface? If not, how will Camex handle two jobs with the same name?
  • Should the source for the interface file from AdDept be the live database or the history records?
  • Are history records for the interface itself necessary?
  • How should AdDept tell Camex about jobs that have been killed?
  • What if the size or shape of the ad had changed?
  • And so on.

There were also technical details about the nature of the interface files. IBM’s PC Support program for the AS/400 could be used to transfer data to and from a PC, but it probably would not work with a Sun workstation. So, a PC would probably be necessary between the Sun Workstation and the AS/400.

My recollection is that two meetings were held at Camex’s headquarters at 75 Kneeland St. in Boston. The first was mostly just to get acquainted and set an agenda. I have no notes from these meetings, and I don’t remember anyone’s name. I seem to remember that Alan may have attended. Sue Comparetto and I drove up to Boston. Camex’s office was very close to Chinatown, and the Camex people treated us to lunch at one of the nearby Chinese restaurants. My other vivid recollection is of my wonder at what Camex had accomplished in a fairly short time.

I am pretty sure that Dan attended the second meeting. Sue and I definitely drove up from Enfield. This meeting was disrupted by a fire alarm. Everyone was asked to abandon the building and stand around in a nearby parking lot. It does not take much for me to be cold, and I was absolutely freezing. I am sure that we were outside for at least an hour. We finally did get to go inside for an hour or two. My recollection is that we made a little progress, but at the end I still did not know what data Camex was planning to send to AdDept. This was because the people with whom we were talking knew very little about the database portion of their system, and the database programmer was not available.

I wrote up a programming quotation for the portion of the interface that AdDept would initiate. I submitted the quote to Dan and Alan. They both approved it. I even started work on it.

Then a very strange thing happened. The person who served as the client liaison at Camex called Dan and told him that Camex had decided not to participate in the interface. They also volunteered to refund deposits that Bergner’s had made for additional equipment.

We got paid for the work that we did—luckily avoiding the bankruptcies of both Macy’s and Bergner’s. Shortly thereafter DuPont split Camex up into pieces and spun them off as separate companies. Camex did not last long after that.

I cannot remember where this happened, but I overheard someone at a large retailer talking with their rep from Camex. The rep said that Camex no longer recommended the Sun workstations. Instead they recommended that advertisers just buy Macintoshes and off-the-shelf software. I was both dumbstruck and disappointed. I had envisioned our relationship with Camex as a possible entrée to many excellent AdDept prospects. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The episode has an epilogue. A few years later I had a meeting in in Mobile AL with some programmers who previously worked at Camex and Gilbert Lorenzo, the advertising director at Burdines department store. That meeting is described here.

1. The design of the AdDept system is described in some detail here.

2. The AdDept installation at Macy’s East is described here.

3. Tom’s time at TSI, including our time at the RAC, is described here.

4. The ups and downs of the AdDept installation at Bergner’s are detailed here.

1988 TSI: The First Crisis

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In retrospect it does not seem like that great of a crisis. However, I have a very strong recollection that Wednesday, August 17, 1988, my fortieth birthday, was one of the worst days of my life.

I intended to to go the office and work all day, but the employees pretty much insisted that I take the day off. I was alone in our new house in Enfield. Well, Rocky and Jake were around somewhere, but cats are seldom sociable during the middle of the day. I don’t remember what Sue was doing.

I also don’t remember what I did all morning. I probably either went for a run of four or five miles—the heat did not bother me in those days—or tended to my vegetable garden.

I fixed myself something for lunch. I always ate early. Then, as usual, I lay down for a nap. I may have dozed off for a few minutes. When I arose from the bed, a crushing wave of melancholy swept over me.

I must have had a book to read; I always did. However; I did not feel like reading.Instead, for the first and only time in my adult life, I got down on my hands and knees in the yard that faced Hamilton Court and picked weeds.

I had been told by our neighbor, whose name was Fred, that both the previous resident of our house and the one before him were professional landscapers. They left us a beautiful lawn of bluegrass on the sides that faced the two streets and zoysia grass in the back. There were almost no weeds when we moved in, and, despite four months of neglect, there were still only a few patches.

While I attacked the invaders into our greensward, I took stock of my situation as I entered my fifth decade on the planet. There were undeniable positives:

  1. I was healthy. Sue was reasonably healthy. She had recently quit smoking, and that was very difficult for her.
  2. Sue and I had a nice new house.
  3. We had two nice pets.
  4. TSI had a real office that was smoke-free.
  5. We were in the process of negotiating a big contract with a client that everyone had heard of—Macy’s. The wooing of Macy’s and the subsequent installation there are described here.
  6. For the first time ever TSI had a salesman who was aggressive and appeared to be competent.
Interest rates in 1988 were very high.

On the other hand, the mortgage meant that our nut at home was higher than ever, and our payroll was considerably higher than ever. IBM’s announcement of the AS/400 (described here) was very troubling. There was no provision whatever for the types of customers that we had been chasing for the last seven years. The new systems were considerably more expensive and less powerful for the models at the low end. I did not see how we could sell them to small ad agencies. The other software vendors could offer much cheaper systems. The alternative was to try to find larger agencies around the country with the budgets to buy more expensive systems. This was, from a marketing perspective, a new business.

Eventually we faced facts and leased an AS/400 model B10.

I could see more unavoidable expenses on the horizon, too. We would almost certainly need to buy an AS/400 for development and support of the Macy’s installation.

We faced a lot of difficult work in the upcoming months. We would need to do the work to assure that our system for advertising agencies worked on the new system. At some point we would need to address the Y2K issue that was beginning to raise its ugly head in the press. Our date functions would not work in the year 2000, which really meant 1998 or 1999.

We did not really have the programming staff to meet these challenges. I could not depend on Sue to help. Denise Bessette was excellent, but she only worked part-time. Sandy Sant’Angelo could help a little, but she could not handle anything difficult. There was no getting around it; the bulk of the work was going to burden my undersized shoulders.

I could not see how the current arrangement could possibly work. Unless we received several surprise phone calls in the next few months, we must depend upon getting a second and third user of the new system that we planned to develop for Macy’s. I did not think that I could possibly get that system as then envisioned to the point where it was reasonable to market it before the company (i.e., Sue and I—the only partners) ran out of money.

I think that at this point I need to address what I call The Curse.

Not bloody likely.

In nearly every respect my parents provided me with an exemplary upbringing. They somehow got me the medical care that I needed to overcome what could have been a debilitating birth defect. I did not have many medical issues thereafter, but they ably and promptly addressed my dental and vision issues. They paid for an excellent education. We had food, clothing, and shelter in a very safe environment. They let me follow my own interests. They let me play tackle football for two years, although I am positive that my mother thought that it was foolish. They did not even make me take dancing lessons after I threw a tantrum about it.

There was one thing, however. I remember distinctly them telling me on several occasions, separately and jointly, “Mike, we don’t care what you decide to do. We just want you to be the best at it.” Not “the best that you can be”, just “the best”. There is no “absolute superlative” in English. Unless a group is specified, it means “better than everyone”. In 1988 the world’s population was around five billion. In any endeavor only one of the five billion is the best.

So, by the standards that they had set for me, at age forty (40!) I was an abject failure. I had never been the best at anything in high school. If you took the worst quarterly grade average that everyone had, mine was the highest, but that counted for nothing. The goal was not consistency, it was supremacy. I was not the best at anything in college either. OK, I was the best debater at the University of Michigan, but I was not even good enough to compete in the National Debate Tournament. After that I was a horrible soldier. I was nowhere near to being the best actuary, if that even means anything. I was not the best debate coach, and, in the end, I could not see any path for pursuing that goal.

I was a really good programmer, but nobody considered me the best at any aspect. In fact, in the area that we had concentrated—ad agencies—we had apparently reached a dead end.

I did not articulate this line of reasoning even to myself as my pile of weeds grew, but it must have burned in my subconscious: At age forty this was probably my last chance to be the best at anything. But how?

From somewhere it popped into my brain that I had to fire TSI’s salesman, Michael Symolon, whose career at TSI is described here. The company had no choice1. We had to sacrifice marketing in order to get the new product ready. The income from the software maintenance contracts and the big Macy’s check might be enough to cover the payroll without Michael’s salary until I could get the product in good enough shape to sell to other retailers. It just had to. It would take a Herculean effort to accomplish all this, but I resolved to do it.

I felt horrible about this decision. I hated firing people. I only needed to do it a few times in thirty-five years in business. All of those occasions were awful, but this one was the worst. I felt that it was more my fault than Michael’s that we were in this position.

I told Sue my decision that evening. She agreed. I talked with Michael a few days later. I assured him that we would pay him his commission on the Macy’s project as soon as everything was completed. He seemed to take it fairly well.

One of the last things that Michael did was to schedule meetings for me in Chicago and South Bend, IN. In Chicago I was allowed to explain the AdDept system that we were about to install at Macy’s to IBM reps who specialized in retail. I knew that quite a few large retailers—Sears, Walgreens, Montgomery Ward, Marshall Field’s, and Carson Pirie Scott, to name a few—were based in Chicago. I thought that they would be very interested in being able to sell a new application and a (newly announced) AS/400 to a previously unautomated department. I am not sure why, but the reception to my presentation was disappointing. They did not even ask me many questions.

I rented a car to drive to South Bend for a demo of the GrandAd system the next day. I am not sure when this occurred, but my credit card was declined somewhere, maybe at the hotel in which I stayed in South Bend. I had to make a very depressing and stressful call back to the office to arrange payment.

We (or perhaps the IBM office) had done a mailing to all of the ad agencies in the area. Five or six had reported that they planned to attend. As usual, I loaded our software and demo data onto the System/36 at the IBM office. Only three people attended the presentation. They all sat together, paid little attention, and took no notes. After my presentation I talked with them for a few minutes. They were all from the same agency. They already had a UNIX-based system running a product called Ad-Aid. I asked them whether they liked it; they were noncommittal.

As I made the long drive back to Chicago that evening I mulled over what had happened. The more that I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the ladies in the audience were spies sent to learn the strengths and weaknesses of our system. This would ordinarily have made me angry; on that day it just depressed me.

For the next three and a half years I worked a large number of hours per week for fifty-two weeks of the year. We sent out a couple of sets of letters to advertising directors at large retailers across the country, and we received just enough positive responses to get by.

The second installation of AdDept (described here) was even more difficult than the first. Hecht’s, the third installation (described here), was a genuine turning point, but it wasn’t really until 1993 that we could consider investing in another genuine salesman—five years of scraping by with only one break, our short cruise of Greece and Turkey in 1992, as described here.

I think that I made the right decision. I cannot envision what life would have been like if I had chosen otherwise

1. Yes, we could have tried to borrow some money. However, we had no assets to use as collateral. The prospect of going down a path that might well have ended in bankruptcy seemed unthinkable to me. The idea of begging for money from relatives never occurred to me.