Case Studies
St Jude Medical Case Study
St. Jude improves its own IT Operations health by using OSM's COSbatch
St. Jude Medical, Inc. is a $1.6 billion global cardiovascular device company with headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. The company sells products in more than 120 countries and has 19 principal operations and manufacturing facilities worldwide.
St Jude Medical runs the MFG/PRO ERP suite from QAD in an HP-UX environment. While MFG/PRO comes with a simple module for automated batch processing, St Jude Medical had not found it adequate for the company's requirements. The calendar function could only cope with simple, regular schedules. Since St Jude Medical's scheduling needs were complex, the calendar required continual manual review. It was also difficult to cater for job interdependencies and pre-conditions and in the event of a parent job failing, dependents would run erroneously as a result. The system also did not provide failed jobs notification, requiring systems administrators to check the success of processed batches manually.
As a result of these issues, IT resources were being consumed inefficiently, users would not always receive reports on time, and business processes such as manufacturing, dispatch and invoicing were being put at risk of delay.
To accommodate the company's scheduling requirements, St Jude Medical initially sought to utilize UNIX cron table utilities and to adapt the module in MFG/PRO in its native programming language. But developing a comprehensive solution would have been an expensive and risky challenge. The company sought alternatives, discovering the availability of packaged solutions such as COSbatch, the scheduler from OSM's COSMOS suite of integrated systems management applications.
"We selected COSbatch over other automation tools we evaluated, because it is a pure batch scheduler offering exactly the functionality we required. And since it runs on UNIX, we could avoid investing in a Windows NT server and associated skill sets," explained Bob Keller, IT Operations Manager at St. Jude Medical.
St Jude Medical elected to engage configuration and implementation assistance from OSM's Professional Services Team. "We engaged around two man-weeks of consultancy time from OSM. The consultants were skilled in COSbatch and the world of batch processing management, of course, but could also understand our IT and business requirements. We worked as a team to ensure a successful solution for St Jude Medical," said Keller.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) procedures required St Jude Medical to run COSbatch-based scheduling in a test environment initially, until proven successful. Once testing was complete, the solution began handling batch processing in the live, production environment starting in June 2002.
In terms of functionality, St Jude Medical values the sophisticated scheduler and its accommodation of interdependencies. Automated notification of failed jobs and the resumption of the batch process upon their rectification have also proven useful.
"The great benefit of COSbatch is that it automates our complex batch process reliably. Implementing COSbatch has freed some 10-15% of system operator time. It also enables earlier completion of batch windows and of vital business processes," concluded Keller.
About Open Systems Management
Open Systems Management (OSM) - a privately held company with venture capital backing, founded in 1988 and based out of Wokingham, UK; Seattle, WA, USA; and Perth in Western Australia - develops and markets low cost, high quality systems and IT operations management software for UNIX, Linux and Microsoft Windows systems. The software is supported worldwide out of offices in Perth, the UK and Seattle, WA, USA.
Web: www.osmcorp.com
For further information, contact Neil Chaney:
Tel. +1 206 583 8721
