The year 2000 will start early on Dec. 31 for UAL Corp., as three of the airline company's Boeing 747s streak across the international dateline en route to Australia.
UAL managers monitoring year 2000 events will get their first glimpse of any computer-related aviation or radar problems as the company's United Airlines jets cross into the new millennium, 16 hours before midnight strikes at the Elk Grove Township corporate headquarters.
While United does not anticipate safety or flight problems, it is looking for any operational glitches, which would demand speedy remedies.
"Australia and New Zealand are the first place in United's world where the year 2000 will begin," says Rick Juster, director of the airline's corporate Year 2000 project. "As the reports feed in, we'll factor them into how we run our operations" throughout the world.
Along with other companies throughout the Chicago area, United is enlisting hundreds of employees to work overtime on New Year's weekend to deal with potential disruptions as the new century dawns around the world.
Executives and other employees are canceling vacations to hunker down in the corporate equivalent of bunkers: command centers, complete with banks of television sets, specially created to coordinate companies' responses to the host of problems that could be triggered by the infamous Y2K computer bug.
Corporate giants, hospitals, banks and middle-market companies heavily dependent on technology are all drawing up contingency plans.
"A lot of our clients are setting up war rooms," says Richard Kearney, Boston-based partner in charge of the global Year 2000 practice at KPMG LLP. "The whole chain of command and decision-making is laid out in advance so they are able to respond quickly."
United's control center, for instance, will be manned by about 20 staffers who will scan reports and data from employees in 134 cities in 27 countries and direct troubleshooting by the 650-plus UAL employees involved in Y2K planning.
The center's tasks will range from the complicated to the mundane: Some will stand ready to reconfigure overseas operations around radar outages, while others will call the airline's 50 to 100 top suppliers after midnight on Jan. 1 to see if their operations have been affected.
New Year's preparations at Rosemont-based Comdisco Inc. are likewise assuming the size and scope of a small military campaign. Complicating matters for the $2.81-billion technology services company: It also has to solve computer system problems for the more than 2,000 clients of its Y2K testing and consulting services.
Comdisco plans to have more than 500 employees working at command centers in Chicago and northern New Jersey -- and all other support personnel available on call, says Allan Graham, senior vice-president for operations.
"We communicated this over a year ago to people, so it's not like they're changing plans," he notes. "If we pulled vacations in November, that would be a problem."
The company plans to equip its command posts with every major long-distance carrier and available telecommunications medium, from satellite to microwave to standard copper wire, in order to accommodate every form of communication used by its customers.
Comdisco has similar backups for reaching employees. "Our call lists include pagers, cell phones and home phone numbers," says Mr. Graham. "If they're key employees, we are issuing a second set of pagers across a different carrier."
* Area hospitals have struck an informal agreement not to hoard drugs and medical supplies, since that could trigger shortages. The Naperville-based Illinois Hospital and HealthSystems Assn. plans to extend the measure statewide at its board meeting in September and wants the American Hospital Assn. to mandate a similar policy for all hospitals.
"If Illinois hospitals don't stockpile, but Wisconsin and Iowa ones do, you create a problem for our state," says Ron Damasauskas, group vice-president with the Illinois hospital association.
And hospitals are bracing for a double-whammy: New Year's Eve falls on a Friday night, and even absent holiday revelry, Fridays traditionally bring in a higher patient tally than other weeknights.
But executives are confident that Y2K won't create major disruptions since they already staff at high levels during the holiday -- and they are already mandated by the federal government to have disaster plans in place, as well as back-up electricity, gas and water.
"In some ways, we had a little bit of a dry run last New Year's with the major snowstorm," says Patricia Becker, vice-president and chief information officer at the University of Chicago Hospitals. "We got to see how our emergency call procedures worked. It was good preparation for the coming year."
* United's control center will provide reports on radar and airport problems to the Federal Aviation Administration and other airlines.
"We don't view this as a competitive issue," says Mr. Juster. "We will share information with any airline that's willing to share with us."
* The nation's 40 largest banks, including Chicago-based Bank One Corp., ABN AMRO North America Inc. -- parent of LaSalle Bank -- and Northern Trust Co., likewise plan to share computer data between command centers.
"Banks have common software," says Steve Kutnick, senior vice-president for worldwide technology at Northern Trust. "If one bank has problems, many will. It makes sense that we share solutions."
Chicago's three largest banks, which all have sizable international operations, hope to get an early jump on Y2K problems by monitoring how cash flows and computer systems work at their holdings in Australia and Asia.