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This paper reports on a benchmarking study carried out on supply chain management (SCM) activities of manufacturing organisations in New Zealand. The purpose of the paper is to report the current state of the play in this area. A postal survey was carried out to ascertain the status of SCM adoption in New Zealand, and identify the issues in SCM that are significant for New Zealand manufacturers. The findings suggest that although there is awareness of the SCM concept in New Zealand, the adoption of the newer concepts of SCM is not very far advanced.

I seem to have spent most of the last few months travelling to meetings to talk about connecting computers together. Of the twenty‐four flights I have made since 1 March this year, only four left the gate within ten minutes of the scheduled time. The longest delay was 3.5 hours. Kennedy Airport introduced me to a new phenomenon which I could have done without—having to wait on the plane for over an hour before being allowed to disembark into a departure hall for another hour or two. If this is the result of the US Government dropping visa requirements, then I for one would be happy to see it re‐introduced!

My main theme this month was planned to be about Terminate and Stay Residents (TSRs) and other ‘awkward’ programs. It still is in some ways, but the common thread this month is now DESQview. I finish off with a few words about upgrading graphics adaptors and monitors.

A number of interesting questions have come in recently. Please keep them coming in.

I only have one general question this month, but in order to do it justice I will have to use most of the column! For the rest of it I shall talk a bit more about interfaces.

The column this month is about CONFIG.SYS, what goes in it and how to control it. It is also about DESQview and Windows 3.0. If this column reads like a computer‐based adventure game or quest, it is because the last two months have seemed like that.

Due to the requirements of the publishing business, this column had a due date of 15 February 1989. Normally, I have two months in which to compile the column, but my company closed down for two weeks over the Christmas and New Year period, leaving me with only six weeks' worth of problems. In fact, I came back from leave to find the following interesting note in my electronic mail.

I have received no questions suitable for this column in the last couple of months, so I will try a bit of philosophy instead, and some crystal ball gazing into the next decade.

I have now been writing this column for one year. If I am to last out another year, it would help if I had some more questions and feedback from you readers. Following an invitation to speak at a conference (from readers of this column) where I was requested to discuss the impact of the Macintosh, it also seems clear that I should restate my position.

I had planned to write about the new international document standards ODA (Office Document Architecture) and SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language) since I have been rather involved with these standards recently in terms of which standards meet our particular needs, and which applications actually support these standards. Since this work is ongoing, I finally decided that an article now would be premature. I was then rather at a loss as to the theme for this month's column. Fortunately a couple of loosely related questions arrived on the subject of disks at the same time as several people decided to corrupt a few floppy disks. So the theme for this column is a slightly technical look at disks and some ways to improve the use and avoid misuse of them.