VHA

Decreased Processing Window Time by 30 Percent Resulting in Cost Savings at VHA

"Utilization of UC4's migration utility allowed VHA to successfully upgrade from the previous version with no interruption to production services. A phased approach to eliminate manual batch processes resulted in an un-attended production batch environment."
Robert Ayr, VHA Inc. Manager of Production Services 

Customer Snapshot
Company: VHA Inc.
Business/Industry: Health Care
Corporate Headquarters: Irving, Texas, USA 
Webpage: www.vha.com  
Technical Environment: Dual servers, SQL DB, 16 Windows Executors (agents), 4 UNIX Executors (agents), UC4.Server (scheduling engine), 4 CPUs, 3 GB RAM 

The Company
VHA Inc. is a national health care provider alliance that delivers industry-leading supply chain management services and enables member networks to drive sustainable results. With 18 offices across the US, VHA serves more than 2,400 health care organizations nationwide.  

The Situation
Five years ago, VHA was using a number of batch scheduling products for its job scheduling needs including Tivoli OPC, TSM, CRON, Data Stage, Windows Scheduler, and Backup.exe.  Based on different system platforms, these products did not integrate well, while the company was depending on these systems to deploy mission-critical processing.    

The company was challenged with the task of combining the automation of more than 2,300 daily batch processes into one solution. With its current licensing agreement nearing expiration, VHA had only 30 days to implement a solution. They set out to find a truly integrated enterprise-wide scheduler – one that would work for both the mainframe and the distributed environment. After narrowing the search, VHA selected the UC4 platform, an enterprise-wide job scheduling tool.   

VHA Goals

• Increase production batch volume
• Decrease processing window time
• Full and seamless integration of job scheduling software with existing infrastructure
• Flexibility and integration with third party vendors
• One single point of entry for job management     

The Challenge
Prior to implementing the UC4 platform, VHA's team of operators was taking on additional projects in conjunction with their already busy schedules by spending their time monitoring scheduling. Operators were receiving numerous reminders (i.e. check database status and or availability, as well as tape alerts and manual alerts regarding external dependencies) which inhibited business flow. As a result, the department was not operating at maximum efficiency.

Streamlining communications throughout the operations center was another issue operators were encountering. VHA did not have the technology in place to have a true operations department. If there was a failure of any sort, individuals were not being alerted that there was something wrong.  Scheduling conflicts arose due to the lack of enterprise-wide visibility and a central operating system.   

In addition, VHA needed an automated daily file monitor for incoming batch files received each day for processing. Efforts up to this point required time consuming system monitoring and operator command interaction. Additionally, the systems were unable to audit the tracking of production batch data changes on a daily basis.   

The company was also experiencing several monthly ad-hoc user requested job plans for monthly processing and quarterly batch processing. This required the department's staff to continuously contact IT operations to request execution for processing and a staff decision had to be made to manually initiate the request of execution.  

VHA's operations department was using several manual alerts regarding external dependencies for job plans for daily and monthly processing. This required the operations staff to manually check for completion of external dependency processing, a very time consuming task.  

The Solution  
"The integration process was seamless and in just 30 days we had all jobs set up and running without any issues at all. Perhaps more importantly, the return on investment we experienced with UC4 was seen right away and we could not be more pleased. UC4's proof of concept is exceptional", said VHA Inc. Director of Data Center Services, Donnie Davis.  

With the UC4 platform, a scalable, platform-independent solution for enterprise-wide job scheduling, VHA was able to consolidate cross-platform batch processing into one scheduling solution with a seamless interface to the mainframe, UNIX and Windows.  

UC4's graphical user interface (GUI) provides a single point of control when monitoring batch activity across all platforms. In addition, the UC4 platform now sends informative emails to staff when a batch execution problem occurs. Implementing the UC4 platform resulted in the reduction of many manual interventions by the VHA operations staff, saving time and money for the organization.   

Flexibility in working with any IT system or application was important to VHA.  UC4's ability to accommodate broad application support enabled VHA to integrate its IT problem tracking system, server monitoring solution and software escalation tool seamlessly and easily into enterprise-wide processing.

Prior to the UC4 platform, a number of VHA IT processes had to be completed manually. At that time, VHA was only able to process 2,313 automated jobs per day. With the implementation of the UC4 platform, the company now automates a total of 10,800 jobs each day, eliminating a majority of the time-consuming manual IT processes.  By increasing the number of automated jobs by more than 350 percent, manual IT processes are now limited and VHA is working more efficiently saving time and resources for the company.  

UC4 Benefits

• Decreased processing window time from by 30 percent resulting in cost savings
• Increase automated IT Processes from 2,313 to 10,800 jobs a day eliminating the majority of unnecessary manual IT processes
• Streamlined communications enable the IT department to work at maximum efficiency
• Virtually eliminated the third shift at the VHA operations center 'The operations center now only staffs one analyst during the hours of 6 p.m.-3 a.m. Mon-Fri'
• People and resources were reallocated to better serve the business
• Full and seamless integration with VHA's existing infrastructure
• Flexibility to work with other third party tools or future IT changes due to UC4's scalability, compatibility and broad application support
• One single point of entry for job management – single point of control for all jobs and entire IT operations

Summary
VHA's success in making a lights-out batch environment was made possible thanks to the UC4 platform's robust functionality and extreme flexibility of processing functions, as well as the addition of third-party tools to further enhance support of a diverse production environment.  Furthermore, the seamless integration and automation UC4 brought to VHA exceeded the goals that they set out to accomplish.  

UC4 has the complete buy-in from VHA management, and technical and development teams have been instrumental in making the UC4 platform  automation approach a success.  

VHA continues to grow in terms of production batch volume. With the constant demands of customer needs and health care supply chain members under the VHA umbrella, they continue to use the existing UC4 batch models for new business model processing each year.