Have you filled your car with gas lately? It was a bit expensive, wasn’t it? Do you enjoy running all over town searching for the cheapest gas just so you can save two cents per gallon? Me neither. Think gas prices will go down soon? Think again. It’s being reported that, by midsummer, gas prices across the United States will top $3.00 a gallon. Now, that’s expensive.

So you know all of this, right? And you’re wondering why I’m bringing it up now, right? Well, I don’t introduce this topic just to make you feel bad. I want you to start thinking about how the price of fuel is going to affect your iSeries shops and businesses.

Is This Your Business?

If you’re a consulting company that sends consultants all across the land to get to client sites, your travel expenses are about to go up. Way up! If, as expected, the price at the pump climbs to more than $3.00 per gallon, you can bet that the cost of flying and traveling by rail will skyrocket, too. Many consultants travel great distances to reach their clients, but that’s going to become a very expensive way to do business soon. And what about those consultants who drive one or two hours each way every day to get to their clients? Right now, the standard mileage rate is about 32 cents per mile, which more than pays for their fuel. But that 32 cents also has to pay for maintenance and wear and tear on their vehicle, which, over a year’s time, is a considerable amount of money. If the price of gas goes over $3.00 per gallon, that 32 cents per mile isn’t going to cut it anymore. Consultants who are used to making big bucks and will, in effect, have to take a rather large pay cut in an effort to subsidize their travel expenses are not going to like this. If you’re a consultant, are you going to look for work closer to home? How about if you own a consulting firm and you have consultants working for you? Are you still going to make them drive to the client site every day? Think you’ll keep those consultants as employees if you do?

Say you’re a typical iSeries shop with a staff that drives into work each day. The average commute is 35 miles in each direction. Once the price of gas increases, your employees are going to have to shell out more than twice the amount of money they’re paying right now just to get into work. And they won’t even be getting the 32 cents per mile that their consulting counterparts are getting to help defray the expenses. In that case, do you think your employees might look for a job closer to home? I think it’s a strong possibility.

So do you pay your employees more or increase their travel reimbursement to cover their expenses? Probably not. After all, your business has to deal with the rise in fuel prices, too. It can’t afford to cover all of the costs associated with that rise. So what can you do?

Send Those Employees Home!

The first thing that comes to my mind is encouraging as many of your employees as possible to work from home, even if it’s only on a part-time basis. This is a trend that’s been steadily growing in popularity among employers as well as employees. The employer benefits in many ways, like not having to pay for extra office space and furniture; the employee benefits by having more flexible hours and the ability to work in a comfortable environment. And, in general, most employees who work from home work more hours per day on average than their office-bound counterparts. This is a result of many things; perhaps most notable is the fact that employees can work at any time during the day (especially programmers), which allows them to complete more work. If this sounds like a feasible alternative to the rising cost of fuel and is at the same time a way to keep your valued employees happy and working for you, you need to know how to make this a reality.

5250 and Beyond

There are many ways to allow your employees to access your iSeries by using the standard 5250 green-screens they’re used to. Here are just a few of the available methods:

• PC5250 emulation software bundled with Client Access
• Another 5250 vendor emulation product (see www.midrangecomputing.com/yellowpages for a complete list)
• Telnet client, which is free on every Microsoft Windows PC
• 5250 Workstation Gateway, which is free with OS/400
• Products such as PC Anywhere, to connect to your LAN and then to your AS/400

Beyond 5250, you can also reengineer your core applications so that they use CGI or servlets to present the data-entry screens to your users. Since many shops are already re- engineering their applications in this manner, this might be a realistic alternative. Using this method, the only things your home workers need are a PC with a browser and an Internet connection. This type of re-engineering can work well for all types of workers (programmers, clerical workers, etc.)

Fight Back!

If you don’t want to lose your employees to a company that is closer to their home or has a more liberal work-from-home policy, it’s time to start planning. Lay the groundwork now with manage-ment to institute work-at-home policies, and start investigating the aforementioned technologies and products to learn which will work best in your business environment. For a head start, check the Midrange Computing Web site at www.midrangecomputing.com/mc. Most of the technologies I mentioned that allow a person to work off-site have been covered in great detail in the pages of MC over the past few years. Search our Web site for more details. And when traffic and the cost of gas makes driving into work prohibitive, you’ll already have your plan in place.