ORSYP

Customer Case Study, Part 2: Modernizing Job Scheduling, IT Infrastructure and Workflow

In this customer case study, we’ll talk about how Ocean Spray was able to solve their IT Operations Management issues by using ORSYP’s Dollar Universe Solution to consolidate two legacy products into a single solution and reduce scheduling definitions and calendars by 40%.

 

The Solution

John Goodfellow is the Senior Manager of Systems & Operations at Ocean Spray who spearheaded this modernization initiative. In Phase 1 of this project, after evaluating several products, Ocean Spray selected ORSYP Dollar Universe to replace its existing legacy solution. Key attributes of the product which influenced this decision include:

1. Peer-to-peer architecture: modernizing scheduling architecture eliminated the need for a master system, which reduced Ocean Spray's RS/6000 hardware.
2. Native FTP: allowed Ocean Spray to replace and consolidate two legacy products - one for Job Scheduling and the other for file transfers. Simplifying to one solution reduced costs by 50%.
3. Integration with SAP’s Job Scheduler: ORSYP Dollar Universe is a certified SAP solution.
4. This simplified the IT infrastructure by eliminating custom middleware and coding that was supplied and supported by a third party.
5. Ease of use and intuitive interface: helped Ocean Spray train staff and easily convert 3000 schedules and have a production-ready system within three months.

According to Goodfellow, "no one looked at Job Scheduling as a platform for automation". With much of Goodfellow's staff tied to consoles, he evaluated any core infrastructure product and business process to identify process improvement and automation opportunities. In Phase 2 of this project, the company discovered that ORSYP Dollar Universe is more than just a job scheduler; it is also a platform to deliver end-to-end automation. Goodfellow and his team were able to improve the following key processes within only one month:

• Back-up and Disaster Recovery: formerly what was a three hour daily process now only takes ten minutes and this saved time is now available for other tasks.
• Warehouse Management: troubleshooting for this mission critical system was difficult and time consuming and IT Operations had little visibility into data flow. By using ORSYP, not only did IT Operations provide visibility and transparency into business operations, support call volume decreased 90%.

Customer Case Study, Part 1: Modernizing Job Scheduling, IT Infrastructure and Workflow

Recently, we published a blog post series here on Mastering ITOM which consisted of four posts to help you with your data center modernization projects: Recognizing the Signs, Things to Consider, Goals & Objectives, and Realizing the Benefits. We left off with the question, “How can my organization benefit from a modernization project?” and we want to show you a real live example of how one of our customers was able to benefit from a modernization project. Today, we will outline some issues Ocean Spray was experiencing across their manufacturing locations and draw out some objectives from this customer case study.

The Environment

Ocean Spray is an agricultural cooperative formed in 1930 and leading producer of canned and bottled juice drinks in North America. Today, the co-op consists of 650 cranberry growers and 10 0 Florida grapefruit growers, with gross sales of roughly $2.05 billion in fiscal 2010. Headquartered in Lakeville-Middleboro, Massachusetts, USA, Ocean Spray also has fruit receiving stations, processing and bottling plants throughout the United States and Canada and employs over 2,000 people worldwide.

The Issues

Nine separate and unique manufacturing locations presented a highly distributed and complex infrastructure that internal IT Operations teams had to support around the clock. ITOM managers were challenged to contain costs, optimize the workforce and align with IT business services, but system complexities led them to be reactive and dependent on third party support.

The Objectives

• Provide technical upgrades or replacement of foundation technology to help develop and optimize the IT Infrastructure;
• Release staff from monitoring consoles, reduce dependency and risk of manual intervention, automate escalations and decrease departmental overtime; and
• Fully automate the payroll process and deliver as a scheduling service to free up IT Operations’ time.

Stay tuned on for the second part of this customer case study: The Solutions.

Customer Coffee Break with Ocean Spray Part 4: Aligning IT Initiatives with the Enterprise

Last, but certainly not least, in the road to improving the relationship between IT and the end-user is providing them with the most appropriate technologies to help improve their job function.  In the past, IT has relied upon the executive team to provide guidance for technology needs and initiatives.  John Goodfellow, Computer Operations Manager of Ocean Spray, talked with us about how business objectives have traditionally shaped IT initiatives:

Product innovation and promotion is naturally a customer-focused business. However, technology line of sight is not always as clear as many IT managers would hope.  As our business objectives drive our company to achieve higher levels of competitive advantage, efficiency, productivity, and reliability become double-edged swords for IT departments that consistently beat objective deadlines and deliver superior business value through technology.  With customer needs as the primary driver, executive expectation is that anything is possible and people rarely stop to consider the time, resources, and costs to deliver intelligent business solutions, reliant on technology.

"The ‘iron triangle’ of project management includes scope, resources, and time as part of an equilateral triangle.  Each time one side is increased the other sides should also increase equally.  To illustrate, with increased scope comes increased cost and time to deliver.  Typically, exciting, innovate ideas do not account for such a balance.  Instead, the scope grows huge as the business builds its objective, but delivery timelines and costs remain consistent with original projections.  Virtualization has allowed infrastructure to do more with budget and timeline constraints, but has increased expectations of technology deployment, and time to market for innovative, large-scale solutions.  As timelines shrink with increased expectations, the potential for technology failure to achieve scope increases dramatically.  IT cannot be successful in the long term by being reactive and must take a proactive stance in capacity planning and growth.  IT must stop aligning IT initiatives with business objectives. Instead, leverage existing budgets to create an infrastructure that will encompass anything the business wants to do."

IT management of the future, if truly focused on the end-user capabilities, should actually avoid aligning IT initiatives with these core business objectives.  Instead, they should focus on architecting an infrastructure that is flexible enough to meet any objective the business needs to meet.  Then when alternate IT service demands arise from the end-user group, the IT infrastructure is able to adapt quickly and IT is no longer required to completely overhaul the system to expand and take on new initiatives.

Customer Coffee Break with Ocean Spray Part 1: Beat the Phone Call

Last month we sat down with the Computer Operations Manager of Ocean Spray, John Goodfellow, to talk about some of the issues enterprise IT management are facing these days.  By the time the conversation was finished, all roads led to the relationship between IT managers and their end-users.  The most important role of an IT department is to provide end-users with the technology they need to do their job well, and to ensure that those technologies are fully functional whenever they are needed.  Over the next couple weeks, we’re going to share some thoughts on how to break this barrier and improve the end-user relationship.

Let’s start with ticketing.  The relationship between IT departments and end-users can be easily damaged by a poor ticketing process.  First and foremost because the interaction between these parties begins with a functionality problem at the end-user level, but even more so because a poor manual ticketing process can potentially lengthen the amount of time the end-user is without that functionality.  One way to improve this relationship is to automate the ticketing process, increasing the speed at which an end-user’s problem is resolved.

John at Ocean Spray talked with us about the importance of beating the phone call:

“Getting the problem to the correct support group is not a function of simply keying a ticket and throwing it over the wall to a tier 2+ support resource, hoping it lands in the right area.  IT departments may struggle with high ticket bounce counts from ever changing support matrices, or lack of ownership from support staff.  By the same token, involving too many support resources, relying on disparate analysis tools can make root cause analysis harder.  Companies can benefit from integrating ticketing systems with automation platforms that perform analysis by exception, and provide support resources with a single source for empirical data. These projects are big and cumbersome, but have long-term benefit when support resources are leveraged against end user problems instantly.  If I have a million dollar plus IT department that nobody wants to call because problems take too long to get resolved, forget about it – I cannot provide value. So, I need a way that by the time they pick up the phone and call the help desk somebody says, 'Yes, I see a ticket was generated for your issue already.  The systems group is working on it.  The ETA is about ten minutes.' "

A quality ticket automation system can help IT management beat the phone call from the end-user to the help desk.  First, identify the issue through automated performance scanning of critical IT business functions. Once identified, automatically create a service ticket based on that usability issue for IT department evaluation. Next, assign that ticket to the appropriate department team member. Finally, resolve the ticket to repair end-user functionality issues.

 

Next up:  Stripping Away Application Service Levels