Focal Point's Transition to Cross-Platform Automation with Fortra
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Use Cases
- Behavior & Emotion Tracking
- Leakage & Flood Monitoring
About The Customer
Focal Point Lights is a Chicago-based architectural lighting manufacturer. The company was going through a transformation, growing in size and needing to compete in a highly competitive industry. Their computing environment was complex, running EnterpriseOne from Oracle across Windows and iSeries servers, as well as custom apps servers, including VB and .net. The company was facing challenges with their manual job scheduling processes on the iSeries servers, which were inefficient and lacked versatility. The company needed a more efficient solution to streamline their job scheduling processes and turned to Fortra for help.
The Challenge
Focal Point Lights, a Chicago-based architectural lighting manufacturer, was facing challenges in a competitive industry. The company was growing and needed to be more competitive and easier to do business with. Their computing environment consisted of running EnterpriseOne from Oracle across Windows and iSeries servers, as well as custom apps servers, including VB and .net. Before the arrival of Camillo Catuara, Applications Development Manager at Focal Point, the organization was scheduling everything manually on the iSeries servers. This method was inefficient and lacked versatility. It was an extensive process to prepare for month-end, and there was no way to send alerts for issues unless someone was constantly monitoring the system. The business would have to put all month-end jobs on hold, and upon release, the team would have to monitor the process while it ran all night long. This extra effort required the company to hire consultants just to monitor month-end batch jobs.
The Solution
Camillo Catuara knew that the organization needed to find a more efficient solution to streamline their job scheduling processes. He relied on Fortra products to begin automating the business processes of Focal Point. Having used Robot previously for 17 years at a large iSeries organization, he felt confident that Robot could successfully automate the workflows running on the IBM i servers at Focal Point. The next challenge was to automate workflows on their other platforms. Camillo learned about Skybot Scheduler through his conversations with the Fortra support team. He was confident in Skybot’s ability to automate jobs across servers. He downloaded the free trial of Skybot and started seeing the benefits. With the assistance of the Fortra support team, Focal Point was even able to develop a unique script to help run their EnterpriseOne jobs. The script translated the return codes from EnterpriseOne into something that Skybot could use and decipher, allowing Skybot to properly monitor EnterpriseOne.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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