Read the UC4 Blog 
Customer Snapshot
Company: ClubCorp
Industry: Services
Company Headquarters: Dallas, Texas, USA
Webpage: www.clubcorp.com
Number of holes of golf 2,214
The Company
Founded in 1957, Dallas-based ClubCorp® is The World Leader in Private ClubsSM. ClubCorp and its affiliates own or operate nearly 170 golf courses, country clubs, private business and sports clubs, and resorts. ClubCorp's Signature Gold membership level offers complimentary golf, complimentary dining, or both, and privileges and benefits at more than 200 facilities worldwide that include exceptional deals at affiliate hotels and resorts (including KSL Resort properties in California, Colorado, Virginia, and Texas), ticket and shopping services, and more. Among ClubCorp's nationally recognized golf properties are Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio (site of the World Golf Championships – Bridgestone Invitational) and Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California (home of the Kraft Nabisco Championship). The more than 50 business clubs and business and sports clubs include the Columbia Tower Club in Seattle; Metropolitan Club in Chicago; and the City Club of Washington, D.C. The company's 16,000 employees serve the nearly 200,000 member households and more than 200,000 guests who visit ClubCorp properties each year.
The Challenge
However, because their IT solutions were not scalable, ClubCorp's transformation into a billion dollar business was not without growing pains. With many remote users and no Service Level Agreements (SLA) in place, the user community became accustomed to handling requests on their own, causing conflicts and slowing down the delivery of reports. And, to ensure key processing streams, such as payroll, quarter end, and master tax received priority, ClubCorp's DBA's had queues in place to limit resource availability to outside users during those processing times.
Ultimately, a lack of visibility to processes across applications and platforms created a risk for system crashes and throughput bottlenecks.
"With Oracle jobs being scheduled via Concurrent Manager and hundreds of users competing for valuable resources against time sensitive production processing, there was no way to guarantee timely delivery of production updates for our customers", said Robert Ayala, Production Support Manager. "We had a great deal of problems delivering and completing time-critical processes for our business users to perform their jobs", he continued.
"On top of Concurrent Manager for Oracle-based programs, Cron was being used to schedule Unix processes, and AT scheduler for NT/AD Club jobs. We used TSM for backups, and homegrown scripts to perform our high priority database backups. With so much going on, there were issues every day", said Ayala.
The Solution
"We selected two products for a proof-of-concept, but with our thousands of jobs, the competitor's interface locked itself up numerous times. The UC4 platform ran smoothly." ClubCorp chose the UC4 platform as a scalable solution to more efficiently support their business.
"The UC4 platform allows us to provide management, the customers, our engineering, operational and development staff with all processing services required to support ClubCorp", said Ayala. "The UC4 platform also enables us to make available historical, current, and forecasted information for data updates. We can address processing anomalies as they are occurring and within a short time provide any information needed surrounding processing."
"Using the UC4 conditional statement feature, we were able to stage processing to run through the night and ensure there was no wasted time. This enabled us to negotiate SLAs and work with the customers to provide them all the data and reports they needed at the correct intervals. We even added an UC4 module to spool output to secure folders, where customers could access their reports via a web interface for the Vista Plus warehouse", said Ayala.
ClubCorp has grown its UC4 deployment to more than 200 remote locations across the country, controlling all instances with a single master hosted in their home shop. This central view of processing allows ClubCorp to monitor and control applications and process steps in their IT landscape better than native job schedulers or scripted solutions would have allowed.
"Before UC4's solutions, ClubCorp's processing world was chaotic and unknown", said Ayala. "Now, all processes being developed with scheduling needs are setup and tested in the UC4 platform. It has proven to be a valuable investment in obtaining our goals."
UC4 Benefits
- Accelerated business process through efficient use of technology
- Increased efficiency through automation
- Robust error reporting keeps Operations staff aware of problems
- Enables throughput
- Utilizes existing IT infrastructure
"There was no visibility into the health of our production processing world. There was no way to know what failed and how long there had been issues. There was no method in place to report and / or track resolutions once they had been applied. UC4 changed all that."
Robert Ayala, Production Support Manager
ClubCorp, USA
