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Customer Snapshot
Company: Cracker Barrel
Industry: Retail
Company Headquarters: Lebanon, Tennessee, USA
Webpage: www.crackerbarrel.com
UC4 Customer: since 1996
Technical Environment: RMS software on Hewlett-Packard HP-UNIX servers; Application: Retek
The Company
Cracker Barrel Old Country Store is a wholly owned subsidiary of CBRL Group, Inc.
The Situation
In 1996, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store®, a national restaurant and retail chain, decided to implement the Retek Merchandising System (RMS) to help the company manage retail CRM, merchandising, supply chain management and logistics. Based on the recommendation of their Retek representative, the company also implemented the UC4 Enterprise Job Scheduler to handle application processing and batch scheduling associated with the new system and several other packaged and custom applications.
According to Chuck Humphrey, Database Administrator for Cracker Barrel, "The UC4 tool provides us with a powerful front-end to handle our entire enterprise-wide scheduling needs and offers seamless integration with RMS. It's easy to operate and maintain."
The Challenge
As Cracker Barrel kicked off its RMS implementation, the development team sought to integrate their various production applications, including inventory, sales history, purchases orders, financial and other data. During night processing, daily records are rolled over into weekly totals and, at the end of each week; weekly totals are rolled over into monthly figures.
In addition, orders from stores requesting shipment of products are sent over to the Catalyst® warehouse management system for fulfillment, large numbers of general ledger batch processes that are run at night, and batch jobs perform maintenance on the Oracle® database used by the RMS software as well as other package and custom applications.
Beyond RMS, Cracker Barrel runs a custom customer-contact application that records and tracks customer inquiries and the Remedy® trouble ticket tracking system. Both of these applications require batch jobs on a regular basis.
"We recognized that efficiently scheduling these batch jobs would be critical to the success of our RMS implementation", said Humphrey. "We asked our contacts at Retek for their recommendation. They told us that the UC4 platform provides the best tool set for integrating the various RMS modules with each other."
"We checked out the software ourselves and discovered that it offers a very powerful graphical front-end that makes it possible to schedule the most complicated chains (the UC4 term for a series of jobs with multiple dependencies) without having to write a line of code. We also liked the way the UC4 platform handles dependencies—by providing straightforward conditions that make it possible to check for the completion of another job, the existence of a file, or a wide range of other conditions before executing a process. The UC4 platform can also provide notification on a monitoring screen or in the form of an email if a job fails to execute."
The Solution
Humphrey pointed out that without the UC4 platform they would have been forced to set up CRON jobs or create custom UNIX scripts to execute the batch processes. While this would have been a very long and difficult programming task due to the lack of a front-end interface, and maintenance would have been even more difficult because the entire schedule would have been hard-coded in the script. Even the smallest changes would require additional programming. That would have been especially difficult if the person who wrote the original code was not available, and it would have been nearly impossible to manage interdependencies between jobs.
The UC4 platformwas used to schedule approximately 500 batch jobs in nearly every module of RMS, as well as the customer contact and trouble ticket applications. Everything runs on a totally automatic basis and the scheduler keeps track of the dependencies and balances processor loads.
The UC4 platform sophisticated exception management means that when a job fails to run, the problem doesn't go any further. Each job can be provided with before, during and after conditions—and the UC4 platform will not begin execution of any jobs that are dependent on a failed program. Instead, an email alert or page will be sent to operations staff notifying them of the problem. The UC4 platform is designed to efficiently balance workloads, providing not only the ability to set priorities for processes but also to create multiple queues so that jobs of similar priorities can be grouped together and run according to a predetermined schedule.
Cracker Barrel uses the UC4 platform to improve the execution of ad hoc jobs by creating modules that do not run automatically but can be executed manually at any time. When a user moves the job into the normal scheduling queue, the UC4 platform provides access to all monitoring, error handling and load balancing features that would be available to a regularly scheduled process.
UC4 Benefits
"The graphical front-end in the UC4 platform made it possible to set up the schedules in a fraction of the time that would have been required with a general purpose scripting tool," Humphrey said. "We received excellent service from the UC4 technical support team not only while we were writing the initial chains but even after we moved into a maintenance mode. The graphical front-end also dramatically reduced the amount of time that was required to maintain the chains. Instead of trying to understand a complex script, we can visualize exactly what the current script does and make any required changes without writing a line of code."
Humphrey said that the scheduler plays a strategic role in the company's plans to continually upgrade its capabilities. "We have used many, if not most, of the scheduler's advanced capabilities, and have been pleased with the flexibility, power and efficiency of the tool. The UC4 platform is easy to use for simple scheduling tasks, yet powerful enough to handle our demanding environment of complex interdependencies between systems and batch jobs", he said.
"We recognized that efficiently scheduling these batch jobs would be critical to the success of our RMS implementation. We asked our contacts at Retek for their recommendation. They told us that UC4 provides the best tool set for integrating the various RMS modules with each other."
Chuck Humphrey, DBA
Cracker Barrel, USA
