The first five years in the Production Planning Department.

· Starting thoughts

I started in a group composed of individuals that had Mathematical, or Statistical backgrounds and had graduated from places like Ohio State, Penn State, University of Wisconsin, etc. and had, many of them, Masters Degrees. This was a smart bunch, and they defined program specifications for the Production Planning Division, whom assisted various manufacturing units with advise on what to make, when to make it, strategic inventory levels, customer satisfaction, and the like. I was impressed with most of the folks I worked with, but soon it became apparent to me that they weren’t all that much smarter than I was, BUT they were the ones who made the presentations, accepted the congratulations, and generally stood out in front of the folks who actually did the work (me). As I had been successful with my first two years of college in Boston, and then had the disaster in New Mexico (personal, not academic) and I knew that the difference between those up front and those in the back row was a Bachelors Degree, I recommitted myself to obtaining my ticket to the front row and began classes at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) on a thrice, or four times weekly basis.

· Early successes

I remember that during my job interview I was asked if I knew what a “relational data base” was which I did, and my description of that technology, I later learned, won me the job. Interestingly, it was the use of that technology in my first assignment after I graduated from college and transferred into another division where that technology could be used, that accelerated my pace towards the leading edge of one of the countries greatest companies (at the time), doing the greatest work. Anyways, I get ahead of my self.

The work I did in Production Planning was interesting and really gave me a great background in planning, but the greatest benefit was the people I worked with, and for. These were, as I said earlier, the brightest and best educated, and they came into play throughout my entire career. I must have written fifty or so systems for the Production Planning Division in the five years I was there, covering elemental master date type listings to actually writing a twelve level, requirements explosion for a division that manufactured exotic chemicals distributed throughout the Eastman Kodak internal, and external supply chain. Possibly my greatest accomplishment was never once did I ever miss a deadline, or an estimate, and this gave me an excellent reputation. I was also, as I became more familiar with customers and the people I worked directly for, able to present my ideas on how “things” should be done, and in many cases weather or not they should be done at all. This later slot would always cause me trouble with management because if you work in a staff position, you’re suppose to keep busy, billing out hours doing what ever, and when someone, like me, says, “This doesn’t make sense to do”, management, whose primary interest is to keep out of trouble, tends to raise an eyebrow. Fortunately for me, during me early career, my successes far outreached my management troubles. Alas, when I graduated from RIT, I was immediately promoted to a professional status and transferred, shortly thereafter, to the “major leagues” of the Management Services Division. I had successfully climbed up the first few rungs of the ladder. I was bold and fearless, but once again wondering if I could succeed in this new level of competition. Little did I know what was in store for me.

· People and things

A fellow named Bob Hildreth hired me. Bob was a technical guy that had gone on to become a manager type. Bob had built the group that I joined single handed, and staffed it with great people he was able to hire from all over the country. It was in this assignment that I met Larry Schlosser, who’d come to save my life several times as I waded through the Alexis Electrix mess with no place to live, Dave Morland, John Kelly, Sandy Webber, Beverly Tytler, were just a few of the technical folks that played a role in my career, and my life. On the client side, Al Cummins became a Vice President, Vaughn Hovey, Brian McCue, Gene Brunner, Kent Smith, Bill (or cess, as we came to refer to him) Poole, Bruce Bundt and so many more it would become impossible to write them all down. They all taught me something, and many, many came back at key points in my career. It was always one of these initial folks that appeared in future assignments that always made it seem as if my destiny was laid out to include this first five years of meeting these people, learning my trade, understanding the importance of your word, and coming through. These concepts held me in good stead, and it was always a great surprise to see a face from the past appear in the doorway of my next project, on the way up the rungs. I was blessed and I was the blessed one.

· Night school

For those of us who have no other way to finish college, night school represents a way to get the ticket you really need to keep from spending a life of answering to people who don’t know as much as you do AND take the credit for your work as theirs (as a matter of fact, they most often convince themselves that if it wasn’t for them, you wouldn’t have known what to do, so, well, you get the point). My previous career in various colleges had left me with about two years worth of credits, so it was a long haul to finish and I was pressed for time. I took three or four classes a week, at night, which meant every night of the week I was aimed at RIT, and some weekends as well. I guess all I can say about this time was it was obviously very productive both at work, and in school (I’d finish with a 3.63 GPA) and in June of 1976 I finished.

· On moving on

I had finally graduated from college, Rochester Institute of Technology, after four years of attending night school, sometimes taking four classes, which some would consider a full load while working away at the Production Planning department learning such things as listening, responsibility, delivering on time and at budget AND exceeding expectations. I was rewarded for my efforts with promotions from fifty-nine, to sixty-one, to sixty-three, to sixty-five level, non-exempt computer programmer and paid accordingly, or at least at the time I thought so. Upon completion of my degree, with majors in Computer Science and Business Administration (with Honors), I was promoted to a Professional status of Wage Grade thirty-nine and provided various easy assignments as a professional analyst within the Production Planning Systems Group I’d started with. The last assignment I had in Production Planning was to analyze a process called “The Material Standards Catalog”, which was a series of books that describes all the equipment, from staples to piping, to electric motors to, really, anything anyone within the company wanted to buy from the Stores Division. The Material Standards Catalog was a series of books, composed of pages broken down into various categories of materials, and for each material there was a description of the item, an item number to use for ordering, and, sometimes, a crudely drawn picture for reference. Each material type had an “analyst” responsible for the pages representing “their” materials, and they were responsible for quarterly updates to “the book”, as it was, almost, religiously referred to. The reason for the analysis was that updating the book had become very expensive because of the manual cutting and pasting process utilized to do so, AND the management and supervision of the Department had decided to update less often, thereby saving money on updating, but had created a mess in the Stores Division because items that were now available for use were not listed in the catalog and items that were out of stock were still being ordered.

I filed my report and recommended the whole process be put “on-line” with automatic ordering via terminals linked to the inventories within the Stores Department and that the Material Standards Catalog be burned by lighting the filing cabinets on fire using lighter fluid, and the “analysts” be merged with the Stores Division folks who were selecting, ordering, and inventorying items for use throughout Kodak Park. As it turned out, a group of people in the Management Services Division were working towards a long term plan to do just as I had described, this pieces was called “Stores II”, and my drawings and documents made there way through the superstructures of the Management Services Division, and I was invited to discuss my concepts with Lew Anderson (I didn’t know him at the time, but he was THE driving genius behind the use of on-line, terminal processing, real time technology). Lew Anderson told me, after listening to my pitch, that “people are already working on that”, and after a short period of time, days, a fellow named David Winter, from the mentioned group shows up and says to me, “So, you want the short story, or the long story?” A week or two after my initial meeting with David I transferred into the PARS group, and it was this group that was developing a new, on-line Purchasing, Accounts Receivable, and Receiving System (PARS) as a development programmer. I had arrived in the big leagues and it was fall, 1977.

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