Some products designed to manipulate file data can be used for storing century fields. The good news is that a product like this may already be in-house. There is at least one product available that deals with such issues, and was designed specifically for century change solutions. This increases the number of digits but not the number of bytes. It is always better to deal with problems before they arise - nowhere is this more true than in Data Processing, and the Year 2000 holds the possibility of some major threats.
Complications can manifest in a number of ways.
Programs might not know it's a leap year, wind up with negative numbers instead of positive, move the wrong century indicator, treat the year as lower than the previous year instead of higher, or just fail mysteriously. And errors might be more than just invalid reports. A wayward program might lose or misdirect financial figures, for example. And software that controls tangible objects, like ATM's, airplanes, or even that occasional smart-bomb could bring more than mere fiscal ruin. After evaluating the verious types of products designed to help companies face the millennium, we feel no one product is a complete solution - they complement each other.