HR Advisor

We have our first HR advisor query:

Q - We are considering training a few employees to be CPR proficient, but don’t know where to begin. Is it true that if we have a couple of people trained, we will be required to purchase a defibrillator machine? If we go through with this, will we exposed to a medical liability?

A - Let's answer the last question first. As long as a non-professional first responder is acting in good faith and is not grossly negligent, there is no individual liability. In New York State, the "Good Samaritan" law (Pub. Health Law §3000-a, and other provisions) protects "any person who voluntarily and without expectation of monetary compensation renders first aid or emergency treatment at the scene of an accident or other emergency outside a hospital, doctor's office or any other place having proper and necessary medical equipment, to a person who is unconscious, ill, or injured..." from any legal action if the person so treated suffers any injuries or death, as long as no gross negligence is involved. Use of an automated external defibrillator (AED) or automatic epinephrine injector ("Epi-pen") is also covered by other, similar provisions of the law (Pub. Health Law §3000-a(2), §3000-b and §3000-c).

Although CPR training covers use of an AED, there is no requirement for a place of business to purchase one or have an AED on premises, regardless of whether any employees are trained to use one.

To find out about on- or off-premises CPR training, contact the Suffolk County Red Cross at 631-924-6700.

Globecomm Scores Again

Hauppauge-based Globecomm Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: GCOM) today announced that it has received a contract from a major media & entertainment company in Asia valued at $5.7 million.

Globecomm will design and install a turnkey broadcast infrastructure enabling the customer to expand its existing subscription - based direct-to-home satellite service. The turnkey project also includes Globecomm’s AxxSys Orion satellite network management system, which will enable the customer to control all aspects of the installed infrastructure including diversity. Globecomm anticipates the completion of the contract in the Company’s fiscal 2010 third quarter ending March 31, 2010.

libusinessintelligence.com News

Well, the elves have been at work on the libusinessintelligence.com site, and a couple of important parts of the site are available now. They are the Human Resources Advisor and the Information Technology Advisor.

Have a question about when to purge old I-9 forms. or about progressive disciplinary process, or about a thorny employee relations problem? Just go to the libusinessintelligence.com HR Advisor page, type in your question anonymously, including some information about your organization - number of employees, number of locations, type of business, but NOT its name - and an answer from a seasoned HR professional (who must remain anonymous) will be posted here within 12 hours. If your need is urgent, please click on the "Email Pete" link on this page, ask your question and you will receive a private response ASAP, usually within an hour.

Have a question about anything to do with IT? Just go to the libusinessintelligence.com IT Advisor page, type in your question anonymously, including some information about your organization and its IT infrastructure, and an answer from a qualified IT professional will be posted here (for now) within 24 hours.

Readers can comment on the answers or offer advice or relate experiences of their own.

We are providing these services for free because we want to establish LIBI as a reliable source of useful information for Long Island businesses. They will remain free when the entire web site goes live.

Recent News from North Shore-LIJ

North Shore-LIJ Health System’s Emergency Medical Services performance in a six-month pilot project with the Village of Rockville Centre has led to a year-long extension of the contract between North Shore-LIJ and the village to 2010. North Shore-LIJ’s Center for Emergency Medical Services (CEMS) surpassed its four-minute emergency response time projection during the pilot program (December 1, 2008 to May 31, 2009) coming in with an average response time of 3.3 minutes.

Alan Schwalberg, director of operations for North Shore-LIJ CEMS, explained that health system ambulances responded to 465 calls and transported 358 people to area hospitals. “We weren’t sure exactly what the number of transports was going to be when we started but we came in right in the middle of our projected estimate,” Mr. Schwalberg said. “While it’s being done in other parts of the country, a program like this is unique to this region. One of the reasons we partnered with the village was to alleviate the heavy burden to the volunteer EMS providers within the village, who were running two ambulances 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

By all accounts, the program has been a huge success. The EMS volunteers, who have other jobs, had been feeling the strain from running more than 1,800 aided cases a year. With the North Shore-LIJ contract, much of that pressure on individual volunteers has been lifted. Pricing for the agreement between North Shore-LIJ and Rockville Centre is based on a sliding scale. Depending on the number of ambulance transports North Shore-LIJ CEMS handles, the village may not have to pay anything for the arrangement because the health system would recoup all of its costs through insurance payments.

North Shore-LIJ’s CEMS is the largest hospital-based ambulance service in the New York metropolitan area and one of the largest in the United States, with more than 60 emergency response vehicles and over 300 emergency medical technicians and paramedics. Operating around-the-clock, CEMS has a state-of-the-art communications center that handles nearly 850 calls daily. A global positioning satellite system allows dispatchers to track the exact locations of its ambulances and how soon they can respond to 911 calls.

VAI Scores with Georgia Industrial Garment Company

Ronkonkoma-based enterprise software developer VAI announced the implementation of its complete S2K Software Suite and an IBM Power™ Systems server for RefrigiWear, Inc.

RefrigiWear, headquartered in Dahlonega, Georgia, is the industry’s leading manufacturer of insulated industrial outerwear. Established in 1954, the company pioneered the insulated outerwear industry.

Robert Scarboro, IT Director, RefrigiWear, stated, “After a thorough industry search, we selected VAI as the ERP vendor for RefrigiWear. VAI stood out as the preferred software provider based on its totally integrated, robust system suite, which has already improved our day-to-day business operations. A major benefit is already apparent with our new automated warehouse, which utilizes Radio Frequency (RF) guns, and has dramatically increased our picking and shipping accuracy has allowed us to conduct a physical inventory in a third of the time that it normally takes.”

An Interesting Addition to the Electrograph Timeline

We came across this information a while ago, but obtained independent confirmation only today. A former Electrograph employee sued the company in a disability discrimination action. The former employee also declared bankruptcy, some time after being discharged (according to the original discrimination complaint) by Electrograph.

In one of the court documents related to that case, the attorney representing the former employee's bankruptcy trustee claims that his firm was contacted by an attorney identifying himself as Electrograph's bankruptcy attorney. We have confirmed that the attorney, Michael R. Dal Lago, of Morrison Cohen LLP, did in fact identify himself as Electrograph's bankruptcy attorney. His biography on the Morrison Cohen web site states that "Mr. Dal Lago represents parties in interest in various aspects of bankruptcy proceedings..." We have emailed Dal Lago and have left two telephone messages, one on voicemail, one with his assistant, and have received no response.

The date of the contact is stated in the court document as "on or about February 26, 2009." (emphasis added) For those who have been following this story, this is more than two months before ViewSonic, in its breach of contract suit complaint, alleges that Sam Taylor, Electrograph president, represented to ViewSonic on May 7 that "ViewSonic had 'no reason to be concerned' about [Electrograph's] financial status or ability to pay." According to the complaint, Taylor made this claim based on his assertion that Electrograph was about to be acquired.

One explanation is that Electrograph did indeed retain a law firm to explore the possibility of filing for bankruptcy protection early this year, but that a "white knight" came along looking to acquire Electrograph, the bankruptcy process was put on hold, and Taylor, when speaking with ViewSonic, truly believed all would be resolved post-acquisition. There is the small issue of the Mike Ahmar suit filed May 5, two days before Taylor's conversation with ViewSonic, and several observers believe it was the filing of that suit that caused the white knight to yank on the reins and stop the acquisition.

But that date in February is within days of when Frank Lincks, Electrograph's CFO, told Promethean that they would receive payment for a $750,000 shipment of product, which payment, according to Promethean's complaint, never materialized, even though the product was shipped.

One former supplier to Electrograph, speaking exclusively to LIBI on condition of anonymity, told us, "It seems that their (Electrograph's) plans were set, they knew what they were going to do, they knew they weren’t going to pay the manufacturers, they knew they were going to keep all the inventory and not rotate it back to the manufacturers to offset their (Electrograph's) payables. Seems to me like it was premeditated." This assertion is also made in the ViewSonic and Promethean complaints.

This former supplier also told us that some manufacturers were willing to buy back their products from Electrograph at pennies on the dollar, even though they had not been paid for the goods, to avoid channel issues. But Electrograph declined, preferring to liquidate the inventory itself.

The channel issues were explained to us by the supplier: "The liquidated inventory ends up reducing the street price for the products. You have resellers with inventory in their warehouses for which they paid a price that keeps them from being able to meet the new, lower street price profitably. They then go to the manufacturer and demand rebates or stock rotation privileges. It’s for a short period of time, but nobody needs that, especially if they’ve already lost money on the product."

So what at first appeared to be an unfortunate but fairly strightforward story of a business going under, now appears to have many layers and ramifications that we could not have anticipated. We will, of course, continue to peel off the layers of this now rather smelly onion and report what we find.

Tracking Stimulus Dollars to Long Island

A web site, http://www.recovery.org/, features an interactive map that allows users to get down to the county level and find out about Federal-stimulus-funded projects out for bid, the dollar amounts to be spent on them and the entities managing the projects. For our Island, so far, the dollar value of projects in Suffolk is far greater than that for projects in Nassau. However, the Suffolk number includes the whopping $184 million-plus chunk for accelerating the construction of the NSLS-II at Brookhaven National Laboratory.