The Retail Equation Case Study

An ActiveBatch Workload Automation Success Story

The Retail Equation relies on its datacenter to provide data analyses to over 27,000 stores. However, the datacenter was reliant on script-driven scheduling for its automation needs, causing issues that were impacting the company’s value stream:

A reliance on Windows Task Scheduler meant the datacenter team had no cross-platform capabilities and limited date/time-scheduling capabilities;
Insufficient reporting and monitoring forced the datacenter team to manually log runtime information and to manually calculate expected runtimes;
Without an event-based automation framework, the team lacked other basic abilities such as triggering jobs based on the arrival of files or emails;
In addition, The Retail Equation’s reliance on scripts was causing simple processes to become overly complex and error-prone.

By The Numbers

99.5%

The Retail Equation has achieved a 99.5% success rate for the 350,000 jobs they run through ActiveBatch.

<5%

The datacenter team now spends less than 5% of its time on batch job creation and maintenance.

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The Retail Equation Implements ActiveBatch

The Retail Equation needed to simplify the development and management of batch processes. They therefore chose ActiveBatch, which allowed the IT team to automate and monitor end-to-end processes across the datacenter by leveraging several key capabilities:

ActiveBatch’s Integrated Jobs Library, providing hundreds of prebuilt jobs steps, accelerated the development of reliable, end-to-end batch processes;
ActiveBatch’s event automation framework allows for workflows to be triggered when files are received, reducing manual interventions and the down-time between jobs;
ActiveBatch’s Reference Functionality allows developers to pass modifications to thousands of jobs with related logic, making workflow changes simple and seamless;
ActiveBatch’s dashboards provide in-depth views of jobs, replacing the manual processes The Retail Equation had relied on for gathering job performance statistics.

In Their Own Words

“ActiveBatch is a bulletproof solution. Moving forward, we’ll continue to build our datacenter automation strategy around ActiveBatch.”

“Technical support is fantastic, timely, and knowledgeable. Support was one of the biggest reasons we selected ActiveBatch.”

“We needed a job scheduling solution that would make it easier to create and manage our batch processes moving forward. These processes are dynamic, constantly changing. Using a script-driven solution added a lot of man hours to building and managing these workflows.”

“When we get a new client, we use the [ActiveBatch] Reference Jobs to create the new workflow and to make a few tweaks that are specific to that client. It’s a big timesaver for building new workflows and making updates to existing ones.”

How The Retail Equation Succeeded with ActiveBatch

Centralized reporting, alerting, and visibility have reduced the time it takes to troubleshoot issues while making it easier for IT to identify and preemptively resolve workload bottlenecks.

Staff productivity and IT service levels have both improved because of ActiveBatch’s prebuilt job steps, development tools, and drag-and-drop workflow designer have drastically reduced IT’s reliance on custom coding.

Nightly file transfers that were processed in 131 steps are now processed in only 5 steps.

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