Cisco Cisco Workplace Portal for Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler Scheda Tecnica

 

 

© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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Business Results 

Several results demonstrate that this scheduler is helping the company become more efficient. From better 

invoicing and crediting, to faster reporting, to easier planning and development, the scheduler is delivering results. 

The Cisco solution makes the verification of sales contracts with customer orders a smoother single flow that 

occurs in coordination with product dispatches and invoicing windows. The company now reaps the benefits of this 

approach because it issues about 30 to 40 percent fewer credits annually. 

 

Orders can now be compared to customer contracts before invoicing deadlines, so that the invoices reflect 

contracted pricing information. Reducing the number of credits saves the company and its customers time and 

reduces costs. 

Another example is more efficient business reporting. Previously, the reports were good but required more time, 

planning, and monitoring to complete than they do now. Sales and marketing managers are pleased to consistently 

have reliable reports, and even Cognos cubes available right when they arrive at work, without any waiting. They 

are also pl

eased at IT’s ability to respond to new or spontaneous reporting needs more quickly than before. 

Another result has been more efficient planning due to better visibility and control. Prior to Cisco Tidal Enterprise 

Scheduler, staff members had to estimate the time needed for each process and build a cushion to accommodate 

unforeseeable circumstances. For example, they had to set a processing window of about four hours for end-of-

day jobs to accommodate the processes, as well as administration and monitoring time. Cisco Tidal Enterprise 

Scheduler has reduced that window to about one hour. That time savings is because staff members do not have to 

estimate or schedule jobs at predefined intervals of time. 

Staff knows exactly what jobs are running when and how long they take, because users can see job status anytime 

and get job execution data that can be used for planning. Users no longer have to schedule jobs at predefined 

intervals, because jobs can be linked together in a sequence of gapless dependencies that the scheduler executes 

one after the other, resulting in a faster flow than before. Additionally, IT personnel can plan in less time for 

unforeseeable circumstances, because they get advance alerts to potential problems from the scheduler, which 

keeps a watch on factors such as system availability or long-running jobs. Plus, job failures have been reduced by 

about 50 percent and the team has early notification of them, so staff can begin the resolution process sooner than 

in the past. Points of failure are also easier to pinpoint, so that the entire process does not have to restart and 

instead can begin at the point just prior to the problem. 

As a special bonus, the solution contributes to employee satisfaction, because it makes daily tasks easier for IT 

personnel and frees some time. Daily users particularly like the enterprise scheduling model, because it gives them 

the ability to use job grouping functions and dependencies to build job logic that reflects the business requirements, 

regardless of disparate systems involved in the processes. 

Daily users say that the product makes it easier for them to maintain their technical understanding of the entire job 

processing environment, which allows them to quickly respond to business rule changes. 

“Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler helps us to be very proactive. This is 
particularly important in an environment where job dependencies are 
complex and so tied to the bottom line.”