ActiveBatch® Job Scheduler Quadruples Portfolio Processing Capacity For Danish
Bank
Jyske Bank Turns to ActiveBatch to Enable Multi-Server Job Execution Environment;
Solution Removes System Wait Time, Reduces Errors and IT Man-Hours
"ActiveBatch has given us the means to parallelize a bunch of processes and control
the workflow in an easy way. This has enabled us to process more data during our
nightly window and thus handle more data during our nightly window and thus handle
more customers."
Klaus W. Haulrich
IT Jyske Markets
Jyske Bank A/S
CHALLENGE
Like most major financial institutions around the world, Jyske Bank, Denmark's second
largest independent bank and a strong presence in the Euro-Scandinavian marketplace,
is committed to providing cutting-edge customer service. But as its private banking
business continued to grow, the company last year found itself challenged to keep
up with the data processing requirements of its customers' investment portfolios.
"Each night, all portfolio transactions from that day's activities—trades, changes,
interest payments and such—are sent from our mainframe to our portfolio management
sys tem,' noted Klaus Haulrich, systems developer for Jyske Bank A/S. 'The numbers
must be crunched by the time our portfolio managers return in the morning. We found
that the number of transactions was growing too large for the four-hour batch window
we had available each night."
Facing yet another increase in portfolios, Haulrich knew the time had come to expand
the number of servers hosting the management software. Up until that point, the
bank had been using simple DOS scripts to manage the processing; with the increase
in servers, however, this solution no longer would be able keep up. A better answer
was needed.
THE SOLUTION
"Our Internet search led us to a couple leading job scheduling products," he said.
"The one we were drawn to was ActiveBatch." ActiveBatch, from Parsippany, New Jersey-based
Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc., is a highly advanced enterprise job scheduling
application for Windows, UNIX, Linux and OpenVMS platforms. Unlike most job schedulers,
ActiveBatch is uniquely able to support the strategic business needs of a modern
IT organization by providing higher-level processing capabilities. Jyske Bank intended
to use these capabilities, especially the application's real-time, event driven
processing, to remove slack time from the new multi-server processing system.
"Our plan was to run jobs in parallel on different servers," Haulrich stated. "Each
major job is a sequence of smaller batch jobs. ActiveBatch would allow us to complete
these jobs successfully by monitoring them and identifying their completion before
triggering the next in the sequence."
Once Jyske Bank installed ActiveBatch, Haulrich began implementing surveillance
features that would monitor the complex batch flow of the portfolio management system.
The surveillance was mainly handled by ActiveBatch's monitoring and alerting features.
Haulrich's goal was to make the system self-repairing.
"Most errors come from stale lock files and the like," he noted. "In the event that
the system can't handle an error itself, it must report to our IT surveillance office
that monitors all of our systems 24/7. They have the ability to call me during the
night so that the batch process is done by the time our portfolio managers return
in the morning."
Through the use of ActiveBatch, Jyske Bank has been able to handle four times the
number of portfolios. Due mostly to the increased data flow and external sources,
the bank is currently experiencing more errors—however, within a few months it expects
the system to be largely self-maintained. When that goal is reached, Haulrich says,
the full benefit of ActiveBatch will be realized.
"We expect to use half the number of financial man-hours to correct errors in the
portfolios. Moreover, we're going to use almost no man-hours to operate the system,
and it will be much easier for us to make changes and expand the system," he states.
"ActiveBatch is a feature-rich, easy to understand application," Haulrich continued.
"It's extremely intuitive to operate and design the system, even for people who
aren't technical geeks. In spite of this, it's possible for a tech guru to perform
very complex operations. Along with this we benefit from the fact that our financial
staff can overview the system and easily see what tasks are running.
"ActiveBatch has given us the means to parallelize a bunch of processes and control
the workflow in an easy way," he concluded. "This has enabled us to process more
data during our nightly window and thus handle more data during our nightly window
and thus handle more customers."
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