Disaster Recovery Procedures used in AT&T's Credit Card Payment Processing Facility Provide Checks "Rare, Medium, or Well Done"

Work Process Improvement Today, Apr 1998 by Cooper, Franklin

When I was in the army, one of the first things I learned was the philosophy of "improvise and simulate." It didn't make any difference if you had a particular tool available to do a particular job. If you did, fine. If not, just find something else that would help you to do the job even if it was fashioned out of alternative objects or materials.

Last week, an article in The Wall Street Journal (Friday, February 20, 1998, p.BT) by Frederick Rose, Staff Reporter, reminded me of that philosophy. In an article entitled: "AT&T Puts New Spin on Old Tale: `Your Check is in the Microwave,"' he goes on to report how if you don't have the proper tools to do a job, use what you have at hand.

AT&T Corp. is struggling with excess liquidity in its credit-card business. Literally.

As many as 7,000 checks a day have been arriving soaking wet at AT&T's credit-card payment-processing facility in Columbus, GA, because of heavy storms in this El Nino year. Most come from Hawaii, California, and elsewhere in the West. Some 42,000 payments a day, with a value of about $100 million, are fed through high-speed equipment that opens envelopes and reads the checks. None of that can happen if the checks are sopping.

Workers in the "exceptions" area, which deals with unusual mail, first tried hair dryers on the checks. Too slow. They brought in irons, but the paper stuck. "We sat around thinking, how the heck are we going to get these checks posted?" says Teresa White, manager of the center.

Then they pressed into service two microwaves in the employees' eating area. A few checks charred. With more experiments, AT&T's check handlers found the right recipe-roughly the equivalent of heating a Danish roll, employees say.

Since the discover two weeks ago, "we have kept the microwave pumping," Ms. White reports. Fourteen temporary employees, usually sought for their typing ability, have been retained to feed the microwaves. "We just ask if they've taken home economics," says Ms. White.

The system isn't perfect. Customers stop paying interest when checks reach this processing center, so speed is vital. But microwaving the checks takes a break around lunch and dinner time when workers need the microwaves back. Sometimes the ink washes away, leaving AT&T with a blank check, and some thoroughly soaked slips are little more than pulp, but dried checks have averaged about $275 each, a spokesman says, resulting in a fine return to AT&T, which recently agreed to sell its operation, microwaves and all, to Citicorp for $3.5 billion.

Employees at the payment-processing center joke about a new consumer choice in credit card billing: Credit card holders would be invited to send the check rare, medium, or well done.

Georgian Dried Processed Payments

1) Bundle checks 10 deep and four wide.

2) Microwave on High for 20 to 30 seconds.

3) Turn bundled checks over.

4) Zap for about the same time. Editor's Note: Disaster recovery companies:

Take Note

Franklin Cooper

Editor