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.

The Six Sigma Expert is…

 
Last month, ORSYP announced its Six Sigma Trivia Contest on Twitter. We received a lot of responses and we appreciate everyone’s involvement, but there can only be one winner. We are now happy to announce that the winner of this contest is Steve Grubb! Steve, who is known on Twitter as @TatoTelly, answered the almost every single question in our Trivia contest correctly. Therefore, he is now the ORSYP Six Sigma Expert. Steve has won an iPod, courtesy of ORSYP Software, with his new Six Sigma Expert title engraved on it. Again, we want to extend a warm thank you for all who participated in the contest.

Happy Valentine's Day, Show Your Data Center Manager Some Love

While the month of February is right in the heart of the winter season, a particularly harsh winter for most of the United States this year, it’s also the month in which we take time to celebrate the ones who we truly cherish in our lives.  We celebrate the sacrifices they make for us on a daily basis.  The way  they put our needs ahead of their own and how they are always there for us when we are in our most desperate times and need a helping hand.  That’s right; we’re talking about the IT managers in your life.  Have you ever stopped and asked yourself where you’d be without these special people?  The ones who make all your problems go away and let you know that everything will be alright.

So we ask that this Valentine’s Day you take the time to appreciate the ones who have shown you care and consideration throughout the year.   However, if you really want to make an impression, forget about the candy and flowers, show them the love by giving them what every IT manager truly wants; an updated and fully automated data center.

Automation allows IT to proactively manage operations through alerts and notifications; not human operators tied to consoles; thus freeing them up for more critical projects (can a box of chocolates or dozen roses say that?).  Automation also includes other numerous benefits such as:

• Containing costs by leveraging existing hardware, software and resources.
• Improving reliability by testing and simulating workflow before transitioning into production.
• Reducing risk of manual intervention and custom coding /scripting.
• Increasing agility by proactively managing through alerts and notifications, in real-time.
• Implementing best practices with business consulting, training and professional services.

 

While gifts and cards are nice, nothing expresses true affection like a well architec ted data center with a web interface for remote access or a single enterprise-class automation solution to reduce the risk and costs associated with managing and maintaining multiple products and tools.

For this one day at least, tell them how you really feel. Tell them that they are the best and that outdated legacy systems are not.  If anyone really deserves your appreciation this Valentine’s Day, it’s the person who will restore your system after it crashes from that way too cute eCard you just clicked on in your inbox.

Modernization – Recognizing the Signs… It’s Time

Similar to vintage car enthusiasts, Data Center managers are continuously spending to maintain and restore legacy products. Vintage cars are cool, and while spending to maintain them is pricy, age tends to increase their value. When it comes to your data center, this is not the case. These aged products often lack in performance and functionality, making it is difficult to justify ongoing investments. Spending to keep vintage tools and technology in the Data Center just doesn't make cents!

Outdated products that have either not evolved with technological trends or do not support modern business requirements (such as Service-Oriented Architecture and Real-time Infrastructure) not only impair IT Operations responsiveness, but they also compromise investments into to new applications and business initiatives that help create a competitive advantage. If your data center tools are suffering from old age and reduced effectiveness, it may be time to consider a modernization project.

Leading industry analysts define IT Modernization as, “Specific best practices and strategies for moving toward a more modern application and infrastructure environment,” and while we agree with this, we’d like to add to it. At ORSYP, we believe that IT Modernization is the opportunity to reduce costs, standardize skills, maintain quality service, and reduce risks.

Keeping vintage technology in your data center is not nearly as cool as keeping a vintage car in your garage. Stay tuned for our Modernization series, we’ll cover the things to consider, best practices and benefits you can achieve by undertaking this project in your data center.

Announcing our Six Sigma Trivia Contest

Today, ORSYP kicked off its Six Sigma Trivia Contest on Twitter. This contest will run for four weeks, with two trivia questions pushed out per week. At the end of the contest, those entrants with the highest number of correct answers will win an iPod. In order to answer these trivia questions, please send us a direct message or a tweet to our Twitter Handle @ORSYP.

 

We look forward to everyone’s involvement. Good Luck!

ORSYP Monthly Update - February

Every month, ORSYP pushes out a newsletter updating our community on what we’ve been up to and we’d like to share it with you. We are going to begin publishing our monthly newsletter here on Mastering ITOM to keep you in the loop of what’s been going on and what is planned for the future.

Have You Visited Our User Forum Lately?

The ORSYP User Forum continues with its steady group of members, now over 1,300 members from more than 400 companies worldwide. Visitors can access solutions, workarounds or best practices for more than 1,000 topics. Check out the Forum here.

What We've Been Up To

Last week, ORSYP hosted an event at the Source in Washington, DC for the largest user group of HP products, Vivit. We had some interesting and educational conversations, and look forward to the opportunities meeting these individuals will bring. We hope to have more of these types of events throughout the U.S. so stay tuned!


Upcoming Events

At the end of February, ORSYP will be participating in the IBM Pulse show as a Silver Sponsor in Las Vegas. We will be presenting a "Lean 6-Sigma Approach", showing how cloud providers and users need improved management techniques to maximize their ROI. Please let us know if you plan on attending the show. We would love to see you there!


As always, we look forward to and welcome your comments and feedback. Check out our Facebook and Twitter pages, or email us at info_usa@orsyp.com.

And The Winners Are…

ORSYP Announces Three Winners in their Best Clock Contest

As promised, it’s time to announce the winners of our Best Clock Contest! We received some great pictures, but could only choose three as winners. The following images and corresponding participants have each won a Lexon watch.

Congratulations go out to:

Ian Johnston, who sent us this clock:

 
 
It is 15 years old and still runs perfectly!

BJ Hinkle, who sent us this clock:

 

This clock hangs by his desk at the office.

And also to Tom Devine, who sent us this clock:

 

We loved this Time Warp clock.

Once again, thank you to everyone who participated and watched this contest evolve! Here is a sample of our favorite entries.

 

To see more clocks, visit our Facebook page and stay tuned for the next contest coming soon!

 

Thursday's Top Five Industry Stories for December 30th, 2010

1. Growing Data Management Nightmare: Unstructured Rich Media

This may seem counterintuitive, but for most enterprise workers, data infrastructure is not a major concern. Individual business units may place an extremely high value on their actual data, but the underlying framework to keep it readily available? That's IT's job.

http://bit.ly/fF4LW4

 

2. Peeking Under the Hood of Your Data Center

In many ways, managing a data center is like maintaining a car. You need to periodically peek under the hood to make sure that everything is in good working order. Here are the questions to ask to gauge the health of your center. This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

http://bit.ly/h4TtYc

 

3. The Ghost of ITIL Past

Ivor took Brandon by the hand and led him through the mists of time to an earlier IT world... which gave rise to the first problem, because the secure access to the data center meant Brandon couldn't tail gate him… Once that hurdle had been surmounted they surveyed the scene in front of them.

http://bit.ly/fOmkKJ

 

4. IT pointers for governments in 2011

The following are some end-of-year suggestions from Herndon, Va.-based CDW-G to keep IT operations in local and state governments running smoothly and effectively. The company, which provides technology products and services to government, education and healthcare customers, holds hundreds of contracts and preferred vendor awards for federal, state and local governments.

http://bit.ly/eS2OtY

 

5. How to make data centres energy efficient

Data centres house computers and provide them with operation and control power. They do everything from delivering tweets, serving web pages to your smart-phone through to logistics systems and supercomputers for scientific research.

http://bit.ly/gKOGKe

 

Thursday’s Top 5 is a weekly post that identifies relevant industry news and stories. Check in every Thursday to stay up to date with the latest happenings throughout the ITOM industry.

 

Thursday's Top Five Industry Stories for December 23rd, 2010

1. Is job scheduling the key to efficient IT?

IT operations software is never going to win any prizes in a 'most glamorous enterprise technology' competition, but for anyone working in the industry it is a mission critical area where IT managers should be constantly looking at new ways to make their systems more efficient.

http://bit.ly/higY95

 

2. Must-have ITSM tool features

IT Service Management (ITSM) is a philosophy around managing computers, devices and systems that takes the end user into account. How do end users -- the IT department's ultimate customers -- see the effect of IT in a business? ITSM moves away from seeing IT as a top-down sort of department, where systems and services exist in their own silos, and toward an environment where IT plays a positive role in the business.

http://bit.ly/eTYG2y

 

3. Advantages of high-performing IT

The gap between high-performing information technology (IT) functions and the rest of the pack is widening. That’s what Accenture found recently after surveying 226 top IT executives – CIOs and other most senior IT leaders – of the world’s largest private and public sector companies and organisations.

http://bit.ly/hJhyun

 

4. The top 12 gifts of cloud from 2010

What a year 2010 has been for cloud computing. We've seen an amazing year of innovation, disruption, and adoption--one I personally think will go down in history as one of the most significant years in computing history. Without a doubt, a significant new tool has been added to the IT toolbox, and its one that will eventually replace most of the tools we know today.

http://bit.ly/gZlUYC

 

5. Putting the Data Center Under the BI Microscope

Today's enterprises have made longstanding investments in applications and business intelligence to drive every aspect of their business decisions. Almost all of these external and internal functions are data-driven. CIOs must be given the same level of visibility into the financial and environmental impacts of their IT services as they have in fields like market analysis and supply-chain management.

http://bit.ly/ijH7Ow

 

Thursday’s Top 5 is a weekly post that identifies relevant industry news and stories. Check in every Thursday to stay up to date with the latest happenings throughout the ITOM industry.