The good news is that the world is unlikely to end on January 1st 2000. The bad news is that, if you work in one of the tens of thousands of industrial plants around the world controlled by computers, you will probably find the first few days of next year rather fraught.

In the past two years, an army of engineers, estimated at about 10,000, has been employed by the $100 billion-a-year automation industry to sort out problems in plants around the world related to the year 2000 programming bug. The total cost of checking the software in industrial operations ranging from breakfast cereal factories to gold mines is estimated at between $2 billion and $10 billion.

While the engineers have yet to finish their work, the consensus is that by December 31st most of the problems will have been solved. Not all, however.

Mr Goran Lindahl, chief executive of ABB, the Swiss-Swedish company that is one of the world's biggest suppliers of factory automation equipment, says: "No one can be 100 per cent sure that everything will work as it should. But my gut feeling is that the horror stories are not going to happen."

Less sanguine is Mr Roland Mensch, director of the Y2K programme at the industrial projects division of Siemens, the German industrial and electronics group that is another big supplier of automation systems.

"I am quite worried about what may happen, particularly in small companies. I can envisage large bottlenecks building up (due to technical problems) as a result of which thousands of companies could be calling for help." The smaller companies, he feels, may not have had the resources to tackle the issue. While Y2K problems have preoccupied those working in a range of industries, some of the biggest headaches have cropped up in process industries, which since the 1950s have been among the biggest users of computers.

The scale of the efforts needed is indicated by the work of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant. Its 500 plants worldwide make a range of products including soap powder, cosmetics and margarine, and contain 100,000 individual computer processes. The company says that by the end of this year it will have spent about £300 million to free its plants of Y2K bugs. It is reasonably confident that the work will have eradicated all problems.

Others take a similar line, but no one is taking any chances. On December 31st, ABB will open 100 call centres around the world which customers can ring if they suspect their equipment is showing signs of malfunction. Several hundred ABB engineers and technicians will be on call.

The ABB workers will be relying on two years of studies into the software at 10 pilot plants around the world run by customers in a variety of industries, including oil and gas, steel and pulp and paper. These studies have given them an idea of the problems created by Y2K bugs, and how to deal with them. ABB estimates that it has $30 billion worth of automation equipment.

In the case of Honeywell, a large US supplier of industrial controls that has recently merged with Allied Signal, another big US industrial goods maker, the company will have employees stationed at several technical centres around the world to receive calls.

A special team of Honeywell technical experts will be at an unnamed oil refinery in New Zealand, chosen by the company to act as a "guinea pig" to show up any big computer defects. New Zealand and other countries close to the eastern edge of the international date line will experience the first hours of the new year before most other parts of the world.

"As the earth rotates, we will track what is happening and try to learn from the experiences of the (Asia Pacific) installations that are already coping with any problems," says Mr John Fairhurst, Honeywell's director of plant services for Europe and the Middle East and a senior member of the company's Y2K planning team.

The work on the Y2K issue has been paid for partly by customers through consultancy contracts, and partly by the suppliers to show that they are taking the problem seriously.

At Foxboro, a US-based automation supplier that is part of Invensys, the UK engineering group, engineers have conducted audits of all the equipment supplied to customers since the 1970s to check for programming errors. Mr John Eva, in charge of Foxboro's Y2K effort, which involves up to 700 engineers, says the effort has uncovered bugs in 15 per cent of the equipment it has supplied.

In these cases, it has informed customers how to sort out the problems themselves, for instance, by rewriting the software, or it has offered to do the work on the customers' behalf. This is sometimes possible through software upgrades sent over the telecommunications network.

A bigger headache, however, has involved applications where the customer has added a significant amount of software to a Foxboro product. In these cases the customer has to tackle any defect itself, although Foxboro can help out on a consultancy basis.

"We believe a key to Y2K is education," says Mr Eva. "As a result we have made extensive use of the Internet to publicise fully what customers can be doing to deal with any problems."

According to people in the industry, lives are unlikely to be at risk from possible technical mishaps. However, breakdowns and bottlenecks in production are likely to occur, although the scale cannot be predicted.

Mr Eva says: "The world supply chain (linking industrial plant) is so complicated that a problem in one place could trigger difficulties elsewhere. The world could be in for a major storm."

Consumers worried about the issue may be advised to stock up on those supplies of chocolate, cornflakes and margarine - just in case.