IBM
0187 IBM & Cinzano
While I was in the final stages of my IBM sales training, I was given a new account to look after. This was Cinzano and they were a bureau account, with their DP operations processed at one of IBM’s data centres. I should point out that, at this time, General Systems Division had just been merged with the Office Products Division and the Bureaux Sales Group to form GBG; General Business Group. Accordingly the bureau business and the System/3 personnel had been merged, and merged salesforce handled the whole range. As already indicated, Cinzano was bureau business, in as much as we ran it for the customer on our machines. But the salesman had really been trying to sell in a System/3 computer and accordingly had managed to sell a bureau account on System/3 -- a type of bureau business which simply didn't exist.
The rationale for this was that the United States had just come out of with a superb offering, called Application Customizer Service (ACS). This was a superb service, in as much as the salesman simply took the customer through a questionnaire - a very long questionnaire, with literally thousands of questions. This definitively specified exactly how his accounting suites were to be used. In the case of UK customers, this questionnaire was then taken across to the States where it was run on one of IBM's largest computers. This then created the programmes which delivered the customer’s accounting suites. It really was excellent, and very reliable. Indeed it was a miracle of programming.
Having said that, although wonderful in theory, in practice it didn't do IBM much good. Most of the customers that it was designed for, the smaller ones, had difficulty answering the questions. Indeed, they better appreciated the competitive offerings, which were standard programme products that had been barely tailored at all. Thus the competitors’ salesmen took their customers by the hand and told them what they ‘needed’, actually what limited facilities their software could provide, rather than asking them what they wanted. Paradoxically, small customers, with almost no confidence of their own business expertise, were much happier for someone to tell when what they had to do; rather than spend their time with IBM working through what was really needed. ACS eventually disappeared from the IBM scene, to be replaced by standard programme products!
There, though, were a number of unusual problems with the Cinzano version of ACS. First was that it was designed to run on a card machine, with relatively little of the data kept on disk. The assumption was the customer had the machine in-house and would feel happier having all the cards to hand. This was almost impossible for a bureau service operation. Indeed, it was not even to run in the bureau, but on the System/3 demonstration unit located in our demonstration suite on Wigmore Street. Even so, all the programmes had to be converted to have data stored on disk rather than on cards. Accordingly, I was put in charge of a team of programmers who were converting the programmes to do this. It was not as easy as it sounds, since the programmes were not be designed to be converted in this way. I remember at one stage we got stuck. No matter what we did, the system failed. It took several days of badgering the US before they admitted that there was a fault in the original programme!
There was one particularly amusing fault. The questionnaire asked what of the various types of pricing the customer used. Thus, one of the options was 'discount per case'. This was designed to find out if you gave a discount to the customer of 5 percent or 10 percent, for example. Cinzano had ticked this box since, they indeed did have such discounts. Unfortunately, when we came to put in the amount, the ‘discount’ turned out to be five shillings per case -- which the system simply couldn't handle. We once more had to rewrite the programmes to cater for this. The problem was that the discount appeared in almost every one of programmes, and had to be rewritten every time it appeared.
As Cinzano had several hundred thousand customers, over a couple of months my team wrote an editing suite which would take the cards - which they had been steadily pounding out in their offices on standard 96 card punches - and convert them into a customer file. This ‘edit’ programme was a miracle of logic, and it ran through the hundred thousand cards in relatively quick time -- leaving very few cards to be checked my hand. We then did exactly the same thing with the product file, again taking a couple of months to write the software, and took it to Cinzano to get the product details run against. Instead of hundreds of thousands of products, we then learned there were only 12. We never used the editing suite, and simply checked them by hand!
As we got closer to the deadline, which was the end of the year in 1972, I had to run the complete system on a test basis. Accordingly, I found myself working through the night at Wigmore Street; since this was the only time we could get on the machine. I saw many a dawn, over Wigmore Street. It was very tiring work, and it was easy to make mistakes. At one stage I had made mistakes that had caused me to run through three levels of back up, before I managed to recover on the last one. It was a very close shave.
The final run was a statement run, and took place on the night before Christmas Eve. The idea was that we would do a parallel run and compare it with their own statements. This was the classic parallel testing that we always did. Accordingly, I staggered into their office at 9 o'clock in the morning -- having spent the whole of the night producing the statement run. I handed it over, so they could check it against the one that they had run themselves. To my horror, I was greeted with “Thank god you're here. Ours isn't ready, so will send your set out instead” -- so much for parallel runs. Fortunately everything was OK.
I went home and the collapsed over the Christmas holidays. As a reward for this work, I thought I had been promised Cinzano, as my customer when I went on territory; but everything changed on January 1st and I never was given it!
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