Orange County Transportation Authority

UC4 Drives IT Schedule for Orange County Transportation Authority

"We needed something that was very stable and very robust – with UC4 we are getting these things. We are also getting a solution that has been fully integrated with our business systems. We are all very impressed with the level of response and support we have received from UC4."
Ray Riggins, Manager of Business Intelligence and Applications Support at OCTA

Customer Snapshot
Company: Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA)
Business/Industry: Transportation
Corporate Headquarters: Orange, California, USA
Webpage: www.octa.net

Located in Orange, California, Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) is a multi-modal transportation agency that keeps Orange County moving with countywide bus and paratransit service, Metrolink commuter-rail service, the 91 Express Lanes toll facility, freeway, street and road improvement projects, motorist aid services and by regulating taxi operations. OCTA is one of the largest transportation providers in the United States that saves county taxpayers millions of dollars each year by increasing efficiencies and removing duplicate functions

Needing to fulfill an unusual set of requirements, unique to bus transportation, OCTA had developed an in-house COBOL based application, known as ACORS (Automated Coach Operator Reporting System), to perform the operational procedures that the authority needed to execute. ACORS manages Coach Operator check-in, check-outs, links to payroll, calculates times and generates driver timerecords and handles Operator Bidding. It produces hundreds of reports on a daily basis. ACORS needs to ensure that the OCTA base management team is notified if there are exceptions that need attending to. Back-end processing, such as reporting, was embedded into the application with API calls being used to submit jobs, status checking and output distribution.

OCTA Challenge
OCTA had previously upgraded the ACORS application replacing the ISAM file systems to use an Oracle database. The existing job scheduler was becoming less reliable and vendor support was waning. Clock changes for Daylight Saving had to be done manually, jobs would fail to start, errors would go unnoticed and reports would get lost. OCTA needed to find an alternate that would allow them to automate processing across their HP-UX based server platform. They also needed to find a way of making this change without retraining end users or impacting ACORS.

“Our old scheduler had a mind of its own. We needed a scheduler that was very stable and very robust. We wanted a tool that would manage high volume processing and help us deal with exceptions by bringing them to our attention,” said Ray Riggins, Manager of Business Intelligence and Applications Support at OCTA. “Our challenges were that we didn’t want to impact our outfacing user group, we didn’t want to write application code and we didn’t want to change our APIs.”

Market research that started on Google ended up with OCTA finding UC4 Software. Meetings between OCTA application development and UC4 Global Services Organization (GSO) teams determined how the existing ACORS APIs worked. The knowledge gathered was then used by UC4 GSO team members to build an equivalent set of interfaces to UC4 Workload Automation Suite.

“We had several meetings with the UC4 team. Each time they would come out and ask questions about our application. Then they went into a huddle, came back with more people and asked more questions. It wasn’t long before they had a proof-of-concept running as a simulation in the OCTA environment,” said Riggins.

UC4 Solution
OCTA has been able to seamlessly modernize its job scheduler to UC4 Workload Automation Suite. Although OCTA base management staff are responsible for submitting and managing jobs, they have no idea that anything has been changed in the back-end of their IT systems. They benefit from using the same intuitive interface they have with ACORS as well as consistent and responsive processing in their batch processing.

OCTA has business critical deadlines that have to be met. Each day at 4pm, a "final board" needs to be posted showing the following days work schedule. Failure to do so can result in penalty payments to the union representing the 1,200 Coach Operators employed by the authority. With UC4 Workload Automation Suite, OCTA makes sure that the many processes that need to run prior to the final board posting are completed in time.

“Allocating resources to our bus routes each day is a complex task for our base management team. They need to constantly reconfigure workload plans to match available coach operator resources with our published timetables. Base management needs to complete the plan before they can run the final board program which needs to be completed before 4pm. The phones start ringing if we miss this deadline and there are penalty payments to the unions that we become liable for,” said Riggins.

UC4 is also being used to enhance exception handling as well as automating end-user report distribution. Header information embedded in output files is automatically extracted by UC4 Workload Automation Suite to determine routing details. Reports are immediately dispatched to their intended receivers, for viewing or printing, enabling end users to become more responsive and productive in their decision making.

UC4 Workload Automation Suite is now an integral component of OCTA operations tightly embedded in its core business application ACORS. “We came through. We made it in spite of the issues. UC4 created a set of custom APIs that allowed us to replace our existing scheduler without affecting our end users. Converting to another product would have added several months to the project,” said Riggins. “We needed something that was very stable and very robust – with UC4 we are getting these things. We are also getting a solution that has been fully integrated with our business systems. We are all very impressed with the level of response and support we have received from UC4.”

At A Glance

Business Challenge