Since my retirement in March of 2003, I've been doing some part-time consulting with Wood-Mizer Products, my former company, at a hefty hourly rate. This came about because Wood-Mizer is migrating to the latest version of their Enterprise Resoucre Planning software SyteLine 7 from SyteLine 5. This migration is made difficult because the operating system changed from an unix based 4 GL database to a Microsoft SQL based database. Since the latter has no user interface, it is connected to the user by way of Visual Basic .NET and a middle layer, which I will not get into. Suffice it to say, now the developers must be able to write in four different languages. this is also exacerbated by the nearly 2000 modifications and custom reports Wood-Mizer has developed which all must be converted to the new system. My job has been to convert many of these modifications over the internet.
After many attempts to correct some severe performance issues with the new system, and several postponements, Wood-Mizer has decided to halt development on the new system and postpone conversion indefinitely until the company, MAPICS can correct the performance problems in SyteLine 7. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.
Therefore, I'm officially re-retired
