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Union Pacific has targeted December, 1998, as its deadline for being ready for its first series of tests. Since virtually every organization that has gone public with this problem has established the same December 1998 deadline, they had all better have contracts with mainframe computer rental services, since just about all of these firms run their mainframes at 90% capacity, seven days a week. Yet mainframe rental companies (e.g., Sabre, which is not itself y2k compliant) still have capacity to rent. Hmmmmmm.
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Software developed internally for mainframe systems contains 21,400 programs, more than 36 million lines of code. Fifty-three percent of the systems will be completed by December 1997, with a scheduled finish by December 1998. . . .
The Year 2000 date problem exists within software products and systems provided by vendors and software embedded inside purchased equipment.
Vendor-supplied software and hardware is used widely throughout Union Pacific. The full impact of the Year 2000 problem will not be fully determined until each supplier of software, hardware and equipment has responded to a formal request concerning Year 2000 compliance. . . .
Large amounts of data are received by Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) from customers, vendors, other transportation companies and financial institutions. The full extent of the Year 2000 problem in this area will not be known until new industry standards are finalized and Union Pacific electronic trading partners implement these new standards. UPRR is working actively with the industry standards committees to finalize and obtain acceptance of proposed Year 2000 EDI standards.
Union Pacific has developed an approach for handling EDI in the Year 2000 that will accommodate any of the proposed Year 2000 EDI standards. Since more than 80 percent of the railroad's customer orders are processed by EDI and more than 20 million car traces are sent electronically each month, EDI data is vital to the railroad operations.
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