Between January of 2001 and November of 2006 I met pretty often with Denise Bessette (introduced here), who was by then my partner and VP of Application Development. I found a folder of Microsoft Word files for the agendas that I wrote up for these strategy meetings. Starting in 2003 the meetings became more regular. They occurred on many if not most Wednesdays, the day that I was most likely not to be at a client’s.
We generally ate lunch together at an order-at-the-bar restaurant on the west side of the river. It had picnic tables near a small stream. I can’t remember the name of the place. I took a drive in the area that my memory associated with its location, but I could find no trace of it. I suspect that it closed, and the land was bought by a developer who put it to another use, perhaps condominiums.
The following summaries are mostly in chronological order. Almost every AdDept client is mentioned at some point. Separate blog entries with much more details have been posted for each of them. They can easily be found using the 1948 Project’s master index program, which is available here.
Many items on the agendas are repeated on subsequent agendas. A few of them persist over years. These were issues for which we never found solutions. The most obvious examples were the efforts to find additional uses for AxN that would benefit newspapers and/or advertisers.
By 2001 the nature of and name for AxN1 had been decided. Our focus was on how to roll it out to the AdDept clients and what we could do to make it more attractive both to the advertisers and the newspapers. We also discussed potential support issues and how the new model 170 that TSI had recently purchased could handle the load of handling the traffic from AdDept clients and newspapers. Occasionally we talked about personnel and other business-related matters.
By 2002 the business environment for large department stores had changed dramatically. Before listing the agenda for one of the meetings I wrote, “We need to change our attitude 180 degrees. Previously we had excess demand and were struggling to increase our capacity to meet it. Now we have excess capacity, and our customers are frugal.”
I had used Net.Data2 extensively for AxN. At the time it was the only thing available on the AS/400 that could interact with the database. By 2002, however, IBM was telling people not to use it. However, it was several years before IBM provided an equivalent tool. Java3, which I had studied extensively and had concluded was not suitable for what we wanted to do, was IBM’s solution to everything.
I was surprised to read how uncertain we were about the willingness o AdDept clients to use AxN. The meeting in March mentioned the need for a second installation. Before reading this I was pretty sure that Belk4 was the first, but maybe someone else had used it on a limited basis.
In 2003 Denise and talked a lot about what kind of programming was marketable to our clients. We investigated quite a few products that claimed to make it easier to make native AS/400 programs web-based . We also talked about what features could be added to AxN so that it would be more valuable to advertisers or newspapers. Usually one of the last items on the list was whether we should spend time converting our code from BASIC to RPG or something else.
In May Sue and I took our first vacation in Italy. I wrote a journal about that adventure and posted it here.
The meeting of November 5 was the first mention of Bob Wroblewski, who has been introduced here. The next few agendas mostly consisted of the same items.
In January of 2004 Bob and I flew to California to visit Robinsons-May and Gottschalks. Bob then started enrolling Rob-May’s papers. After that the process of getting newspapers to subscribe to AxN snowballed for several years. At about the same time our long courtship of Dick’s Sporting Goods finally paid off with a contract for AdDept. So, in only two years the outlook for TSI had improved greatly.
In February it occurred to me that there might be one dominant software company for the newspaper business. If we could create an interface with their system, it could advance the AxN project tremendously. However, I later discovered that each paper, if it had anything at all, had developed its own software or paid someone to do it. There was no uniformity. Fortunately I discovered that this was a blind alley before I wasted a lot of time, money, and energy on it.
The agenda for the February 18 meeting made it clear that the AxN project was about to take off. Most of the long-time AdDept users had at least been contacted. Stage Stores was enthusiastic, and they had just acquired another chain named Peebles. Finally, Dick’s Sporting Goods had finally signed the contract to purchase AdDept. To deal with the expected increase in use of the Internet by the newly subscribing newspapers Denise was arranging for installation of a T-1 line from AT&T with the Cox Cable connection as backup.
The March 3 agenda closed with a mention of the NAA, which was the abbreviation for the Newspaper Association of America (changed to News/Media Alliance in 2016). I eventually talked with someone at its headquarters, but I foresaw that it would take a lot of time and effort to build a productive relationship with the organization. It might have been a good project for Doug Pease (introduced here) or Jim Lowe (introduced here), but at that point they were in the rear-view mirror. I never thought that this would have been a good fit for Bob. Besides, he was busy talking to newspapers, or at least soon would be.
It took me a few minutes to decode this entry on the entry for March 24: “Robinsons: Lower price for LANG?” LANG was the Los Angeles Newspaper Group,.5 a company that printed and distributed tabloids in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Advertising for all those papers was managed from one central location. TSI agreed to send them one bill. We treated them like one large paper with several editions.
In April we were waiting for Dick’s to begin the solicitation for AxN before we approached Macy’s West and RadioShack. The April 21 entry contained positive news about Filene’s use of AdDept for accounting, including the monthly closing process. The next week Denise and I discussed the proposed trip to talk with Hecht’s main paper, the Washington Post. I ended up visiting them on May 14. It gave me quite a thrill, but I don’t think that they ever agreed to use AxN. Apparently we also considered a press release about being in business for twenty-five years, but I am pretty sure that we never did it.
The agenda for May 26 poses this question about Filene’s: “Have they made a big mess?” Bon Ton agreed to send letters to its newspapers about AxN.
In June we discussed various methods of emailing claims. I don’t recall that we ever took any action on this. There was ominous news from Federated that they put all quotes on hold. The total number of orders in AxN exceeded 100,000. The June 30 agenda announced that Dick’s was moving into its new building over the subsequent weekend.
The first item on the July 21 agenda was “Denise’s three issues”. I wonder what they were. Item #10C talks about a follow-up meeting with the Washington Post that never happened. The next week’s agenda explained that they did not respond to my email. A second e-mail was sent on August 4. On August 25 (my dad’s eightieth birthday) I called the Director of Advertising Services.
Something distressing was evidently going on at Parisian, but I don’t remember what it was. That disclosure was somewhat offset by the following good news: “RadioShack: 34 active; 39 testing; 22 Macy’s West; 15 L&T; 4 Parisian; 56 other.” RadioShack did one of its four geographic divisions at a time. The last two entries brought up new subjects: “How can we make better use of my time and Lucia’s6?” and “5-year plan”.
The August 4 agenda was the first to mention SQL7. I used SQL for all of the AxN programs, but the AdDept programs mostly created temporary indexed output files that were populated by one program and read by another using IBM’s recommended approach, ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method).
Marshall Field’s (introduced here), the last big installation of the May Co. version of the AdDept system, was first mentioned in the agenda for September 8. We were very excited about the meeting scheduled for September 16 at Hecht’s advertising department in Arlington VA. By this time the work for the Peebles installation at Stage Stores was operational enough that we were ready to solicit their newspapers for AxN.
I was serious enough about contacting companies that sold software for ad agencies that I spent $35 to buy the booklet from the AAAA. I questioned whether we should write to each of them to propose an interface with their system and AxN. I don’t remember ever doing so.
The agenda for November 1 mentioned that Field’s used an ad agency for both broadcast and newspaper. My recollection was that they started using AxN almost immediately and dropped Haworth, the agency that bought newspaper space. However, later entries seem to contradict this. The same agenda mentions that TSI was carrying $55,000 in questionable receivables in the last month of its fiscal year.
I never had to make an onsite visit to our AxN client in Guam.
The November 10 agenda mentioned that—after months of foot-dragging—Federated Systems Group was finally going to “cut over” to their new AS/400 system. During this period we were worried about providing support for AxN for Macy’s West’s newspapers in Hawaii and Guam. This was needless. The papers subscribed for years without any problems. This was also the last agenda that included a mention of a press release about TSI’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
A major issue early in the year was how to handle the process for installing changes that Dick’s had forced upon us. There were other issues, too. The first agenda of the year ends with the question: “How can we get this installation on the right track?”
Two minor enhancements to AxN for the advertisers had been completed: custom emails and downloading of email addresses. However, I had apparently given up on the possibility of interfacing with computer systems used by the newspapers. There was also a process for reconciling the orders on AxN with the schedule on AdDept.
By March 10 we had a big programming backlog because of the large number of difficult jobs for Marshall Field’s. Denise controlled this process. I simply asked, “How can I help?” In the same meeting we discussed for the first time what, if any thing, we should do to forestall Macy’s from replacing AdDept with the system known then known as FedAd that had been developed by Burdines. Our contact at Macy’s West stated that “it did not exist”.
At the March 25 meeting we talked about Macy’s East for the first time in many months. For the April 28 and May 4 meetings there is separate agenda for AxN. For some reason I seemed worried about using it at Foley’s and Stage Stores.
The first item on the regular May 4 agenda was one word: “Lucia”. Lucia was able to handle much more challenging projects than our other administrative employees. The problem was trying to come up with things for her to do. Another issue on the same agenda posed some interesting questions:
We never mastered the trick of Cloud Computing.
How could we set ourselves up to manage systems for our small clients? Bon Ton, Gottschalks, Neiman Marcus
IBM (like Federated)?
TSI
Dedicated high-speed line for each user?
On the net?
Telnet? How would they print? Pdf?
VPN: AS/400 to AS/400?
VPN: PC to AS/400?
High availability?
Disaster recovery?
A third party?
We did not spend a great deal of effort on trying to provide “cloud” computing for our customers. It would have involved a great deal of expense and risk. Just seeing that term “disaster recovery?” item gives me the chills.
Later in May Sue and I took our second Italian vacation with our friends Tom and Patti Corcoran. I wrote a journal again, but this time I had a camera. The results are posted here.
The agenda for June 2 began with the surprising news that Chuck Hansen at Marshall Field’s had asked me to back off on AxN. It also mentioned the agenda for a meeting with Macy’s Marketing on 5/17. It probably intended to say “6/17”. The next agenda, dated July 8, only stated, “Follow up with …” I must have forgotten the name (Robin Creen) of the lady with whom I met at Macy’s Corporate Marketing. There is also a reference to Bloomingdale’s. I suspect that this was in response to information from Tom Caputo, who worked with AdDept at both Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, that Bloomies had never taken the FedAd software out of the box.
The July 11 agenda has some detailed information about a proposed newsletter publicizing how AdDept handled inserts. Some of these enhancements were done for Dick’s.
The August 26 agenda has a new and somewhat mysterious major topic called “AdDept ideas”. The two subtopics are “SpooliT8 ($9K) or other Excel” and “Service Bureau”. I think that SpooliT made .csv files out of spooled output files. It may have had a few other features.
Throughout this period there were references to The Oregonian, the major paper in the Portland area that stopped paying invoices for AxN without canceling and never responded to attempts to find out why.
The agenda for September 14 mentions the long letter that I sent to Robin Creen. Its contents are posted here.
The agenda for October 12 had several tantalizing references. It began by stating that IBM’s VPN9 product, which TSI used for communicating through the Internet, with clients’ AS/400s would be activated on the following Saturday. It also reported that a newsletter had been sent out.
Robin Creen topped the October 24 agenda, but there were no details. The second item referred to renewal of iSeries News, a magazine.that catered to the AS/400 community. It had undergone many name changes, and the content had also evolved. We kept all of the back copies in the shelves that in 2023 are in my office. When we closed down the company (details here), I threw all of them away.
The third item was “SBC Contract”. I don’t remember SBC, but I suspect that it was an IBM Business Partner that had sold more systems than we had or had somehow managed to deal directly with IBM. During this period TSI was not allowed to quote or sell any IBM products. We had to go through a Super-VAR.
The fourth item was “Lucia” with no details. The fifth was “AT&T Global: do we need it?”. I am pretty sure that this product allowed me to get my email when I was on the road. In the days before Wi-Fi I had an AT&T product installed on my laptop that allowed me to use a phone line in my hotel room to sign on to AT&T and look at my email.
We must have received an inquiry from Sport Chalet10 a chain of stores in California that was similar to Dick’s. Until I saw this entry again I had completely forgotten about them. Evidently I wrote them a letter and sent them a newsletter, but nothing came of it.
The last agenda for 2005 was dated December 6. The #1 item was the blitz to get an AdDept system for Macy’s South up and running in time for the season that started at the beginning of February. The second item was an inquiry from Circuit City11. This was another dead end.
The “My disk recovery” entry brought back some really bad memories. I think that I recovered everything on my computer’s hard drive, but it was costly and painful. The best part was that I got an external hard drive12 that made it very easy to back everything up.
There are no entries for 2006 until June. I remember being under extreme pressure to bring the two huge AdDept installations at Macy’s South and Marshal Field’s up to speed. Meanwhile we received the crushing news that Macy’s and the May Co. had merged, and Macy’s would be the dominant player.
The agenda for June 13 began with the word Corum. I am pretty sure that it referred to broadcast buying software. Based on the date it was probably associated with Macy’s South.
That agenda also contained a major item that simply stated “Modernizing and marketing AdDept”. We never did find a feasible way to transform the AdDept screens into something that looked modern. We made more marketing attempts after this, but they did not amount to much. This was the peak period for AxN. More than four hundred papers had subscribed. TSI’s administrative person spent a good deal of time printing and mailing invoices and depositing checks from newspapers.
The agenda for October 11 was startlingly different. It mentioned two AS/400 models, a 170 and a 270. My recollection is that we did development and ran the business on the 170, and the 270 was devoted to AxN. It also mentions recruitment. I am not sure whether that referred to the administrative position or programming. The agendas have gotten shorter and shorter.
This agenda also mentioned the C compiler for the 270. Denise was upset at me for even investigating the possibility of converting TSI’s code to C, which was widely used in the Unix world.
In the agenda for October 18 the scary term “Macy’s North” appeared several times. It referred to the company that was formerly called Marshall Field’s. Evidently the marketing (never called “advertising”) department there had never bought into using AxN for insertion orders. They may have still been using Haworth.
“Maintenance” was often mentioned in the agenda for November 1. We probably never charged as much as we could have for the kind of service that we provided our clients. I was evidently still spending quite a bit of time at Belk.
I was surprised to see Circuit City mentioned again on the agenda for November 8. We must have received another phone call. The term “Foley’s project” also appeared. I am pretty sure that that was the code name for the long and frustrating effort that Denise and I undertook to sell the company.
The last agenda that I have was dated July 10, 2007. It contained only four items:
Trip to Macy’s West
515
Dick’s quotes
Foley’s
Never even a nibble.
Denise and I continued to meet, but not on a formal basis. By then I had almost given up on selling more AdDept systems. There had been so much consolidation in retail that the number of good prospects for the system had shrunk to almost nothing. Nordstrom and Dillard’s would have looked nice on our client list, but it was hard to think of anyone else that was worth pursuing.
We still did quite a bit of custom programming during the next five or six years, but managing the list of open jobs did not require the juggling act that had characterized the previous decade.
The AxN business decreased for a few reasons. The big stores no longer trusted newspaper ads to bring in customers as they once did. Newspaper readership was way down. Some of the AdDept clients outsourced their buying to agencies or media services. That always meant a drop in the number of papers.
I enjoyed those meetings immensely, and I miss them.
1. The history of the development of AxN is posted here. The system design is outlined here. The description of the process by which it was brought to market begins here.
2. Net.Data was a scripting language written by IBM for the AS/400. It was quite popular, but IBM for some reason decided to drop it in favor of the open source scripting language php, which required implementation of the Zend php engine.
3. Java is an object-oriented language that was developed by people at Sun Microsystems. The company released an open-source version. Java was almost the only thing that IBM talked about at the PartnerWorld convention that Denise and I attended in 2000. It is described here. On the AS/400 applications written in Java required a lot more resources than programs written in the native languages. If run on the same box the Java programs were slower, a lot slower.
4. The history of the AdDept installation at Belk is posted here.
5. In 2016 LANG merged with the Orange County Register and a few other papers. The new organization was called the Southern California Newspaper Group. The third item under the Federated topic was “AxN letter to four divisions”. Since “Bloomingdale’s” was the second item it mus refer to Macy’s East, West, South, and Florida (Burdines).
6. Lucia Hagan was TSI’s administrative person during this period. She was introduced here.
7. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It was invented by IBM, but the company did not endorse its use on the AS/400 until 2004.
8. SpooliT is still on the market in 2023! Its website is here.
9. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. The Wikipedia entry is here.
10. Sport Chalet was sold to Vestis Retail Group in 2014 and was liquidated in 2016.
11. The sad story of Circuit City ended with its liquidation in 2009.
12. I still have that hard drive in 2023. However, I recently discovered that I no longer can find the cable that was used to attach it to a computer, and the company that made it was no longer in business.
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.
Aurore Murphy.
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.
Steve Weinbaum.
My second stop was in planning:
Miriam Pechar.
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.
Karla Schottle.
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.
Jeanna Corley.
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.
Karen Martin.
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 AXN. 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.
Karen, Annemarie, and Bill.
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 AXN 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.
Gretchen Watkins.
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.
I am pretty sure that this is Aurore.
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 AXN 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.
Jackie Foulds.
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:
Don Detelj.
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).
Kristal Brown.
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.
Randy Reeves.
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 AXN 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 Wiseman.
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 AXN. 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.
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.
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.
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.
In early 1988 Sue Comparetto, who had handled the GrandAd accounts in New York City, received a call at TSI from IBM’s Manhattan office. One of our contacts, Quique (KEY kay) Rodriguez1 wanted to talk with us about Macy’s New York. Its advertising department had been using software programs on an obsolete System/34 to keep track of its advertising expenses and income. The system had been developed internally by people who no longer worked for Macy’s. Documentation was minimal.
Macy’s New York had recently merged with Macy’s New Jersey. The new entity was called Macy’s Northeast, and its offices were on an upper floor of the “world’s largest store” on 34th St. in Manhattan. The advertising department’s existing system had already been stretched to the limits and would never be able to handle the increased load. Moreover, the users were not happy with some aspects of the code. Alan Spett2, one of a very large number of vice-presidents at Macy’s, had been provided by corporate with a budget for replacing or updating the existing system.
This may have been the last time that I actually jumped.
I jumped for joy and clicked my heels when I heard about this opportunity. For some time I thought that companies that produced and/or scheduled their own advertising represented a attractive untapped market for the skills and knowledge that we had acquired from our seven years works with advertising agencies. Evidently I was right. We had never approached any of these departments because I had absolutely no idea how we could even identify which companies created and placed their own ads.
Coincidentally, IBM had just announced a new mini-computer, the AS/400, to replace the System/36 (which had replaced the System/34 in 1983). This announcement and its implications for TSI are described in considerable detail here.
The train brought us to Penn Station, only a block or so from Macy’s.
I made several trips by Amtrak train to the city to document the requirements for the new system. Sometimes I was accompanied by Michael Symolon, TSI’s marketing director at the time, and sometimes by Sue. We soon learned that Macy’s advertising department did everything that an ad agency did except keep track of the amount of time spent on individual production jobs. In fact, they had an advertising agency name that they used when ordering media. In addition, the department had many other needs that regular ad agencies lacked. Specifically, they were required to allocate both production and media expenses to the selling departments. These departments were identified by three-digit numbers. Each was assigned to an administrative group that also had a number. In turn there were three levels of vice-presidents who “owned” administrative groups3.
Macy’s also billed the merchandise vendors (Clinique, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s, etc.) a portion of the expense for ads that featured their products. The cost to the merchandise department was net of these “co-op” billings. The contract could be for a percentage of the media cost or it could be a fixed amount.
The first phase of this job entailed providing Macy’s with everything that they needed to get the ads in all media scheduled—printed schedules in the format that they liked, “insertion orders” (called “delivery tickets” by other retailers) to accompany the materials sent to the media vendors, and so on—in every media. It also included keeping track of expenses and co-op for each level of the merchant hierarchy. There were several different formats that they used for reporting these breakdowns.
I envisioned that the creation of any ad would consist of five steps:
An ad number within the season and a version code that was usually blank would be entered, or ad numbers could be assigned by the system by pressing a function key.
A new ads screen allowed selection of the ad type (e.g., black-and-white ROP) and entry of the primary run date, which must fall with the season.
The other information that applied to all of the media for the ad would be entered on a header screen. This varied by type of ad, but each screen included selection of a pub group—a list of newspapers, markets, or stations.
A media selection screen showed one line for each pub in the pub group with dates, quantities, rates, and other costs or discounts. Any line could be edited or deleted. Additional pubs could be specified.
A participants screen to provide the list of departments or groups for the ad with the expected cost percentages and co-op amounts for each.
Storewide ads could be entered rather quickly. Ads with many departments or groups might take a few minutes. This approach was warmly received. The employees were accustomed to specifying the participants for each pub in the ad.
After the schedule was created, any aspect of an ad could be changed, or the ad could be killed, (in exceptional cases), deleted, or moved to a different date. New ads could be defined. Once the ad was run, the actual participants and the actual co-op could be provided. History records with dates, times, and user ID’s were kept for all changes.
How did Macy’s determine the percentage of the actual cost of each ad that was to be allocated to each department or administrative group? The process astounded me. In one room4 were seated from three to five clerks. Each was provided with a stack of newspapers and a list of ads that were scheduled to be run as well as lists of department numbers and the numbers of administrative groups. They looked through the newspapers to find the ads that Macy’s had run. They then measured—with a ruler!—each of the “blocks” in the ad to see how many columns wide (six columns to a page) and how many inches deep (i.e., vertically) the block was. They then entered the column inches for each block. For blocks that were not specific to a department or group, a special “storewide” department #999 was created. The total of the measurements must exactly equal the total size of the ad.
My approach changed this process so that the clerks measured ads, not insertions (the ad in a specific paper). If the ad was already measured, the clerk could see what had been entered, who did it, and when.
A similar process was also required for each page of each direct mail piece and newspaper insert. The ads for other media were not measured, but actual percentage breakdowns were recorded.
Similarly, the actual co-op dollars received from the selling departments (a process called “turning in”) could be recorded. Lists of missing co-op could be printed.
The most important financial reports for Macy’s compared the committed co-op and costs with the actual measured costs and actual co-op. They could be run for any or all merchants (the vice presidents who owned the departments) and any or all media.
Camex was located at 75 Kneeland St. in Boston.
In addition to all of this, Alan had ideas for other modules such as an inventory system for the merchandise used for photo shoots in the studio in Newark and a system to manage the shoots themselves. He also wanted us eventually to work on an interface with the Camex system that Macy’s used to create the images for the ROP6 ads and books. Thank goodness these ideas were not included in the original contract.
TSI’s GrandAd system for ad agencies had been built around a file for ads, the key to which was a three-digit client number and a five-digit job number. So, each client could have up to 99,999 jobs. For the departmental system, which I decided to call AdDept, I designed a similar structure, but, since Macy’s itself was the only client, I made the three-digit code stand for the season. 891 meant spring of 1989. 892 was fall of 1989. Eventually, a one-digit code for the century was added as well, but otherwise this proved to be a very feasible approach.
Many other structural changes were necessary. The most significant one was the designation of a one-character version code as part of the unique identifier (key) to the main media file. This could be used to make distinctions that varied by pub (media vehicle). For example, one item in an ad might be “swapped out” for a different item in another ad. The catalogs sent to some markets might not include some pages.
The new table for the pub groups mentioned above allowed Macy’s to identifying papers in which they often ran the same ad, e.g., the tabloids. There was no limit on the number of pub groups, and pubs could be in any number of pub groups.
I did not mention this to anyone at the time, but while I was gathering requirements, I noticed a very serious flaw in the design of Macy’s existing software for the S/34. The same ad was run in a few papers, but each insertion in each paper was given a separate ad number. The clerks doing the measuring were each assigned one or more newspapers. They measured and then entered into the computer the amount of space for each department in each ad. The person next to them might have already measured the same ad in a different paper, but there was no way for them to use that information; they had to key it all in again. So, with the S/34 design the increase in the number of papers added by the merger would more than double the work in allocating costs. My approach would decrease the work even with more papers. They would only measure the ad in one paper.
How great was this? The ROI for this feature alone would easily surpass the cost of the entire system in the first year!
How was such a colossal blunder possible? Well, the S/34 programs were designed for Macy’s New York, which advertised almost exclusively in only three papers: The New York Times (a broadsheet), the Daily News (a tabloid), and Newsday, a Long Island newspaper with a unique shape. Each of these would require separate versions and therefore separate measurements. However, all of the new papers were either tabloids or broadsheets. There was no need for separate measurements.
At some point in mid-summer TSI needed to do a presentation for Macy’s at IBM’s office on Madison Avenue in New York. There was no competition; no other software developer wanted anything to do with this project. The alternative for Macy’s was to enlist their IT department to do something. No one mentioned this, but I was quite certain that the IT department would not be able to deliver a functioning system that met all the requirements within the required time frame. Of course, I was not certain that we could do it either. However, we had delivered several large projects on schedule, and I was willing to put in the hours5 to make this one a success.
590 Madison Ave., then known as the IBM Building.
I wanted to demo the GrandAd system and explain how we would adjust the database to fit Macy’s. I made arrangements to use a S/36 in IBM’s office at 590 Madison Avenue to show how our advertising agency system currently worked and how it could be adapted. I considered–and still do–this to be the most important presentation that I ever gave. It was my only chance to persuade Macy’s Advertising Director, Howard Adler, that TSI should be contracted to do the project. I figured that if we got Macy’s, and we did a good job, a whole new market would be opened to us. At that point I was still naive enough to assume that other retailers would surely be much less difficult because we had already done the programming for the largest retail advertiser in the country.
I needed to transport our GrandAd programs and our demo data to New York. Not only was it not possible in 1988 to send them there electronically using something like FTP. We did not even have access to a compatible medium. The I/O device on IBM’s S/36 in NYC read 8” diskettes. Our system in CT used 5¼” diskettes. So, I saved our programs and our data onto nine 5¼” diskettes. Then I used a machine that I had purchased for just this purpose to copy the 5¼” diskettes onto previously blank 8” diskettes. I then loaded the 8″ diskettes into a “magazine” that I had obtained somewhere. The S/36 in New York included a device for reading diskettes from such a magazine.
This is the only photo that I could find of a magazine. The diskettes are inserted in and removed from the opposite side.
You say that you are not familiar with the concept of diskette magazines? For over a decade IBM used them on the S/34 and the S/36. As far as I know, no other system from any manufacturer followed suit.
They were almost completely plastic. Their width was about an inch and a half. The other dimensions were just large enough for 8” diskettes. One side was open to allow insertion and removal of diskettes. Small plastic rails on the top and bottom of the open side kept the diskettes separate from one another. The only thing on the magazine that was not plastic was a small metallic bar near the top of the open space that held the diskettes in. The bar could be lifted up on a hinge to allow access to diskettes. The machine that read the diskettes could also do this (like a juke box), and it was smart enough to read them sequentially.
The process of saving and converting the programs and data, which I probably did over a weekend, took several hours. I then inserted the 8” diskettes into the magazine, put it in my sample case with my other materials, and then stowed the sample case in the trunk of my Celica. I do not remember why, but I must have left the car in the sun for several hours. When Michael and I reached New York and took out the magazine, we could see that the little iron bar that restrained the diskettes had apparently become hot enough to melt little notches into all the diskettes. The magazine drive on IBM’s system refused to read them. O tempora, o mores!
Michael had a brilliant idea. He used a sharp knife to slit the edge of each damaged diskette and nine new diskettes that we borrowed from IBM. The actual data was not, of course on the plasticized paper that one could handle (and therefore slit). It was on a very thin circle of magnetized film inside. For each new diskette Michael replaced the blank film disk inside with the one that he had retrieved from a diskette that I had made. Then he carefully inserted the nine new diskettes that hopefully contained our programs and data into the magazine. I then loaded the magazine into the S/36’s magazine drive again and entered the command to restore the files. The machine successfully read six diskettes. However, at that point it made an awful noise and totally mangled the seventh diskette including, because we had no way to reseal the side that Michael had slit, the precious film inside.
My dog could not juggle six balls.
So, I was faced with the prospect of making the most important presentation of my life with absolutely no software to demonstrate. The pony in my “dog and pony show” was a stick-figure drawing. Would anyone notice?
Fortunately, my many years of experience in debate at adjusting a presentation at the last minute kept me from panicking. I began the presentation by apologizing for the technical problem. I then illustrated the approach that we proposed to take using the whiteboard that IBM provided, and I answered questions as well as I could.
It was enough. Macy’s agreed to put in motion the process of contracting with TSI. As Alan later said, “You were definitely the only game in town.”
The plan was to install the system in the “System/36 environment” of a B30 model of an AS/400. The I/O devices were a single 8” diskette drive and a ½” tape drive. TSI had no system that had either of these drives, and so our only choice was to execute the cumbersome conversion process every time that we needed to make changes.
TSI could not even afford J. Cheever Loophole.
I sent Alan our usual two-page contract. He sent it to their legal department and returned one with about twenty-five pages. I should mention that the TSI was dirt poor at this time. Sue and I had been low on funds before, but this was the first situation that rose to a crisis level. Details are posted here. We certainly could not afford a lawyer. I had to read the contract very carefully and assume the worst. After a few changes, we agreed, signed it, and started work. I did almost 100 percent of the coding. The other programmers were busy with work for our other clients, and I did not trust Sue to do the work.
I was not able to use a single program from the GrandAd system. I thought that at least one of the many insertion order programs that we had written for ad agencies would be usable without much modification, but I was wrong. The people in retail advertising just do not think like the people in advertising agencies. Every single program was written from scratch.
We had no time to produce a detailed design document describing the project. Our drop-dead deadline was the end of the season in late January. All programs must be totally functional. The process was:
Write the code.
Get it to the point where there was something to show to Macy’s.
Save the changes to 5¼” diskettes.
Copy the 5¼” diskettes to 8” diskettes.
Take the train to New York.
Install the new software from the 8″ diskettes. This could take up to an hour.
If changes had been made to the database definitions, make them on Macy’s system.
Make changes on the fly as necessary.
Show Macy’s how the new code works.
Save the changes to 8” diskettes.
Bring the 8″ diskettes on the train ride to TSI.
Copy the 8” diskettes to 5¼” diskettes.
Install the changes on TSI’s system.
The luxurious Windsor Locks Amtrak stop. This is the view looking north. From the parking lot the engine’s light could be seen under the bridge.
This was, to be sure, a terrible way to do things. It required me to make at least one trip to New York every week for several months. Usually it was up and back on the same day. I stayed overnight at a hotel a couple of times. Often I made two up-and-back trips in a week. Each trip required a twenty-five minute drive to the train platform. I boarded the train at 6:00 AM in Windsor Locks. There is only a platform there. I therefore sat in my car with the heat on until I saw the light of the train approaching.
The word you did not want to see was “DELAYED”.
If everything went well, I arrived back at the train platform at 9:30PM. The trains in the evening, however, were almost never on time. Those trains originated in Miami, FL. There were plenty of opportunities for delay as each one crawled its way north. A report on my most memorable Amtrak experiences is posted here.
During this process Alan would quite often come up with new thoughts as to what should be in the “base system” covered by the contract. I grumbled, but I almost always did what he asked. One morning I saw a Daily News in Penn Station with the headline “Macy’s Computer System is Driving Me Crazy!” I bought a paper, cut out the headline, and taped it to the inside of my sample case.
Meanwhile, TSI had received only a deposit from Macy’s. However, we were desperate to receive that final check. I saw no alternative to this nightmarish schedule.
The scope of the project was enormous, and almost nothing from the GrandAd code was usable for this project. In addition to everything else, the emphasis at Macy’s was on newspaper ads. In my experience ad agencies used the term “print”, which for them referred to direct mail and magazines. Most agencies treated newspapers as magazines that published more often on cheaper paper to a geographically limited audience. The ingrates who ran the papers did not even offer discounts to ad agencies. Macy’s, on the other hand, could run a dozen or more ads in one issue of a newspaper.
Time to go home.
Mirabile dictu! By February, 1989, the system was stable enough that Macy’s paid us most of the balance. This did not end the crisis at TSI, but it allow us to meet the payroll for a few months. In retrospect, I cannot imagine how we pulled it off. I remember working seven days a week. I was always at work by 6AM, and I seldom left before 7PM7. I admit that I always went home for lunch, and I usually took a short nap.
Gary Beberman.
What enabled the completion of this seemingly impossible task in that amount of time was the fact that Alan somehow got Gary Beberman8 to serve as the project manager. He could speak advertising to the workers at Macy’s and geek to us. I only trained one person; Gary trained the others. I am not sure where Alan found Gary or how he got assigned to the project, but he was a godsend. He saved us a huge amount of time and frustration, and he was also quite adept on pouring oil on troubled waters during the frustrating periods in which I was working feverishly on the code.
The next two projects for Macy’s were an inventory system for the “loan room” (usually called “merch room” at other retailers) and a more sophisticated system of entering and reporting actual costs, what Macy’s called “financials”. I gathered the specs for these projects on trips to Macy’s and produced detailed design documents, which Alan quickly approved.
Denise Bessette did almost all of the programming on these two large requests, and she did an outstanding job. I installed the code and showed the people at Macy’s how to use the programs.
Merchandise that was afraid of the traffic could have just as easily taken the train.
The loan room gathered merchandise needed for photo shoots and sent it to the photo studio in Newark or to some other location. Part of the automation of this process was the printing of tags for each item. Almost as soon as this was implemented, the amount of pilferage reportedly decreased dramatically. The merch room manager told me that previously a lot of merchandise had trouble remembering the way back to Manhattan from Newark. She was extremely happy with the new system.
Denise also completed the other project according to the approved design document, and I delivered it. The finance manager then produced a bevy of changes that she wanted. I offered to quote the changes at TSI’s usual fee of $75 per quote. Alan said that Macy’s was under the impression that these programs fell under the terms of the original contract. It clearly did not include them. He was also surprised that I insisted on charging for my time at Macy’s after the warranty period. I would not give in on these matters, and this caused some bitterness.
At some point in this process TSI leased an AS/400 model B10 from IBM. We hooked everyone up to it, and we converted all of Macy’s programs to run in the native environment instead of the System/36 environment. This project went fairly smoothly. I don’t remember any great headaches, and the programs were considerably faster.
In other respects the installation also proceeded rather smoothly as long as Gary was there, but when he and his wife moved to the West Coast, things started to get a little testy. Alan hired Satish Rahi9 (accent on the second syllable in both names) to manage the installation. Satish must have presented himself as an alternative to paying TSI to program reports. He thought that he could produce any desired output using a third-party query product from a company called Gupta Technologies. Their Wikipedia page is here.
Satish was shocked that the product did not work on most of our tables. I told him that there was nothing in our contract that said or implied that third-party products (of which even then there were quite a few) would work with tables that we designed and implemented. IBM’s Query/400 product had no trouble with any of our tables. After considerable digging I determined that the source of the problem was that we wrote records in BASIC, not in SQL10, which was not even available on the AS/400 yet. The designers of Gupta’s product evidently did not take this into account when they began marketing to AS/400 customers.
Satish started lecturing me about industry standards for databases. I explained that the industry standard for writing x-digit positive integers in BASIC was N x, which left-pads these numbers (such as the ad number) with blanks, as opposed to ZD x, which left-pads with zeroes. In fact, most versions of BASIC did not even have a way to write “zoned decimals” without writing extraneous code to do it11. One day I got so upset while arguing with Satish about this that I seriously considered driving down to the Amtrak stop so that, after sitting on a train for over three hours, I could ride the elevator up to his floor at Macy’s and punch him in the nose.
Not long after this conversation Alan fired Satish, and eventually we changed all the programs to “zone” all the integers. Of course, we got paid for neither this project nor the conversion to the native environment, but we felt that we had to do them to hope to stay in IBM’s and Macy’s good graces.
Denise Jordaens.
From that point on we dealt with Denise Jordaens12 and Lee Glickman13 at Macy’s. Things stabilized, but the department did not get nearly as much out of the system as it could have.
Over these years Macy’s went through a lot of changes. In January of 1992 the company declared bankruptcy, thereby leaving TSI with a stack of unpaid invoices. In 1994 Macy’s was absorbed into Federated Department Stores, which had itself just emerged from bankruptcy. This gave them a new set of standards to abide by. Eventually other acquisitions gave Macy’s in New York a large number of new stores to manage on the east coast. They continued to use the loan room system and to pay our maintenance bills. They never asked about any of the enhancements that were installed at Macy’s South and Macy’s West.
There were other complications as well. On one occasion Macy’s asked for someone from TSI to visit so they could explain their problems with and aspirations for the system. My schedule was totally booked for weeks in advance. I asked Sue to take the trip. She did. I don’t know what transpired, but Denise Jordaens later told me that they made a voodoo doll of Sue and stuck pins in it.
I may have made some bad decisions about Macy’s. I did not yet understand how decisions about products and services like those offered by TSI were made in a large retail advertising department. This issue is discussed in more detail here.
TSI probably should have charged more for the original installation and used the money to hire another full-time programmer. Maybe we should have tried to borrow money from somewhere. I was unwilling to put all of our eggs in the Macy’s basket. Macy’s declaration of bankruptcy was a devastating blow to TSI. When Macy’s was acquired by Federated Department Stores14, it appeared to me that the decision to concentrate our efforts elsewhere had been a sound one.
As it turned out, however, Macy’s eventually gobbled up nearly all of the regional department stores in the entire country. The strategy that I chose helped TSI succeed for more than twenty years, but if I had gambled on Macy’s, we might still be in business in 2021. On the other hand, we would have been working almost exclusively for Macy’s for most of that time. Such an experience might have really driven me crazy.
The story of the Macy’s installation had a bizarre final chapter. It is recorded here.
1. According to his LinkedIn page (which is here), in 2021 Quique Rodriguez is retired and enjoying family time. I suppose that it is possible.
2. Alan Spett lives in Atlanta in 2021. His LinkedIn page can be found here.
3. So, I designed the database with five levels of participants. The lowest level was always called a department, but the names of the other four levels to be used on reports and screens could be specified by each AdDept client. At all Macy’s divisions they were called Administrative Groups, Group VP’s, Senior VP’s, and Group Senior VP’s.
4. This same room housed the AS/400, at least for a while. I sat at an empty desk when I was there. When the first phase of the installation was completed, some of the measurement clerks were reassigned to other tasks.
5. Unfortunately, I don’t think that I was careful enough to account for the large number of unproductive hours that I would spend on trains, in meetings at Macy’s, and in converting files. The round-trip train ride alone accounted for six or seven hours and a drive of nearly an hour, So, each full day at Macy’s was matched by another full work day getting there and back!
6. ROP stands for “run of press”. All display ads (as opposed to preprinted inserts) that are run in a newspaper are called ROP. It is not an acronym; all three letters are pronounced.
7. I am a “morning person”. Any work that I did after 7PM was likely to be counterproductive. Moreover, I needed a few caffeine-free hours so that I could fall asleep at 10PM and stay asleep.
8. I have kept in touch with Gary Beberman. He moved to California to work as a consultant and then was employed by Macys.com. Macy’s West and Neiman Marcus hired him as a consultant during their AdDept installations. He was the only consultant whom I ever respected. He has lived in Marin County for the last five years. He and his wife are hoping to retire to Italy.
10. SQL (structured query language) was invented in the seventies by two IBM researchers, but at the time of the debut of the AS/400 no IBM computers used it much. The reason, we were told, was that it was much less efficient than the ISAM methods that IBM endorsed. Later IBM computers, including the AS/400, were designed to maximize the efficiencies of SQL queries.
11. What I said to Satish was correct from my perspective, but perhaps I should have asked him what made Gupta Technologies think that the AS/400’s relational database conformed to these “industry standards” that he cited. After all, SQL had been invented by IBM, and IBM was not yet positioning its AS/400 as an alternative to the “standard” databases such as Oracle, Sybase, or Informix.
12. According to her LinkedIn page (here) Denise Jordaens still works as coordinator of media systems for Macy’s.
13. I think that this might be Lee Glickman’s LinkedIn page.
14. A more detailed discussion of TSI’s long and torturous relationships with Federated Department Stores can be found here.
