Cisco Cisco Workplace Portal for Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler Data Sheet

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The company wanted to reduce the number of credits by delivering more accurate initial invoices, thereby saving

time and reducing costs for both CSBP and its customers. The company addressed its invoicing problem by using

enterprise job scheduling automation from Cisco to bridge the separate invoicing and contract management

systems and simplify reconciliation of the two.

Switching to an enterprise oriented view of job scheduling was an important transition because it helps the

company become more efficient.

Intelligent Automation Solution

Adopting the Enterprise Scheduling Model

Deep experience has educated CSBP about the many ways that consolidated cross-technology job scheduling

automation can improve business efficiency. Prior to using Cisco

Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, in 2008, CSBP

upgraded its JDE ERP system and was also migrating to a Microsoft Windows environment. Due to time and

resource constraints, the company temporarily used a simple point scheduling tool for managing complex

processes.

That interim solution required workarounds and scripting for scheduling complex processes external to the system.

Exception scheduling around holidays and alerting was not possible. In addition, end-of-day processing - including

invoicing - would fail on occasion. IT personnel knew that they needed a product designed to be a comprehensive

enterprise job scheduler that could meet the complex needs of the company.

In February 2009, with upgrade and platform migration activities completed, CSBP application developers and

operations staff chose Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. The company cited several specific reasons for choosing

Cisco, such as coverage for enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, a single comprehensive view,

support for nested dependencies so that processes run in the correct sequence, and many other enterprise

oriented capabilities.

Since then, CSBP has been using Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler to manage large, involved processes that

include sets of ERP jobs, database jobs that modify ERP data, Structured Query Language (SQL) jobs, and jobs

that touch other applications such as the contracts management system. The scheduler manages vital processes

such as:

●

Re-pricing and invoicing for the chemicals business

●

Re-pricing and invoicing for the fertilizer business

●

Accounting processes that run after invoicing for the two businesses is complete

●

Invoicing/finance stream that runs general ledger (GL) postings and updates

●

End-of-day jobs involving maintenance and supply operations

●

Creating and delivering timely business reports

The team now sees a global, central view of scheduled jobs, which is easier to work with than multiple scheduling

views. Also, job definition is simpler because of a visual interface that lets users define all jobs in one familiar way

using one environment. The scheduler runs the processes across multiple technologies, handles the

dependencies, and notifies staff of potential issues through information-rich alerts.

With the Cisco product, it is easier for CSBP to control highly complex scheduling dependencies and automate

many processes that formerly required time-intensive manual intervention. This Cisco solution is helping the

company meet the challenge of improving operational effectiveness, which in turn has a beneficial effect on the

bottom line.