More than 30 users, including a Toronto HR outsourcer, benefiting from the flexibility gained
At Morneu Sheppell, a Toronto-based firm providing human resource consulting and outsourcing services, the ability to automate workloads has been critical to the company’s ability to support continued growth.
For years, it has used BMC’s Control-M workload automation software to manage workloads and scheduled processing involved with managing pensions and health benefits for employees and employers across North America. The push to workload automation came when the firm signed up one particularly large client, Bell Canada, says Michael Bobbato, advisory analyst with Morneu Sheppell.
“The workloads required on a daily basis were more than anything else the data management team had been doing. It needed automation to keep the data up to data and to be able to load information for applications and systems,” he says.
Now Morneu Sheppell runs about 800 jobs in its production environment daily, Bobbato says. “That’s far too much to handle without automation,” he adds.
But with only two people on the automation team, IT could still end up being a bottleneck, Bobbato says. For example, if business users want to suspend jobs, they’ve got to do so through the automation team. But that’s problematic should the request come in after hours, for example, he describes.
To assure against such delays, IT has decided to use the Control-M Self Service capability BMC rolled out in late January. “We’re granting business teams the ability to check their own processes and, in some limited capacity, force their own processes,” Bobbato says.
Control-M Self Service replaces a homegrown tool IT made available to business users about two years ago to use on a small subset of jobs. But it will provide so many additional options then the homegrown tool, which has been used about 6,000 times, he says.
Bobbato says he’s set up 15 processes that users can tap into from the self-service tool. “This represents a fairly comprehensive list, covering the broad scope of the processes we need to run. If somebody has a request to run another specific job, I’m open to configuring that because this is so simple to work with,” he adds.
“With the self-service capability we’ll be empowering our business teams to check on their processes themselves. That’ll save a lot of time and let them answer questions that might come up from quality assurance, for example,” he says.
BMC reports that more than 30 companies, including Morneu Sheppell, have signed on for Control-M Self Service since it became available earlier this year.
