About 75 people from the pharmaceutical company's 200-person SAP project will be joining him on the job. So will Steve Frick, a systems analyst at Delfield Co., an equipment manufacturer in Mount Pleasant, Mich., which has less than seven weeks left to convert to a newer, year 2000-compliant version of manufacturing software. A lot is being crammed in due to the company's goal of finishing as much as possible in 1998. It's too much, too fast, unreasonable and excessive. To help soften the sting and boost worker morale during the crunch, some companies are offering incentives that range from full-course holiday meals to extra pay and additional time off after the first of the year.
Workers also can order meals, at company expense, from dozens of area restaurants.
Hoechst plans to serve its IT workers three meals per day. The company also has increased from five to 10 the number of vacation days IT workers can carry over to next year. If workers have accrued more than 10 days, Hoechst will pay them for the additional days. Meanwhile, Orlando Regional Health Care System is taking the opposite approach. Wawa Inc. IT manager Dave Kelble said he managed to skirt the vacation issue up front by buying separate hardware on which to test remediated year 2000 software code.