In-Depth
PNC Invests in Its Y2K Solution
PNC Bank Corporation is the 13th-largest bank holding company in the United States,with $75 billion in assets. PNC Bank relies on a sophisticated technology platform tosupport its delivery strategies, improve productivity and reduce costs.
Recognizing the size, scope and risk of the Year 2000 problem, PNC Bank’s firststep was to establish a Year 2000 Project Office to ensure that meeting the challengesposed by Year 2000 was a top priority for the bank. The bank then called on Keane Inc. toassist in achieving its changeover requirements for Year 2000. The Project Office remainscritical tool for facilitating communications among PNC Bank’s Management InformationSystems organization, business users and Keane.
Keane is assessing all of PNC Bank’s mainframe systems, developing a conversionstrategy for in-house-developed systems and converting code and performing testing.Weighing the time, cost and business parameters, the Year 2000 Project Office decided on acombination of windowing and date-field expansion techniques for the conversion.
To accelerate the initiative’s progress, Keane introduced several automationtools. These included selected Viasoft tools; SmartEdit, a COBOL editing tool that allowsdates to be quickly identified and corrected; and Bridge 2000, which is used to translatedates. Meanwhile, a team of 40 Keane members is currently executing testing for PNCBank’s in-house-developed software, including applications for the TreasuryManagement, Deposit and Trust businesses.
Tracy Merrick, PNC Bank’s Year 2000 Project Executive, comments, "Timelinessand accuracy at this stage are essential to our efforts to prevent operational errors andthe corruption of valuable bank data."
Year 2000 activities have remained on schedule and within budget since the onset of theinitiative. "I believe our risk-reduction measures, including our hiring of Keane,will prove critical to our success," concludes Merrick.