Wood (Amec Foster Wheeler) Replaces Multiple Scheduling Solutions with ActiveBatch

An ActiveBatch Workload Automation Success Story

Wood PLC, formerly Amec Foster Wheeler, is an international enterprise offering specialized services in engineering, consulting, and project management. Amec’s fragmented automation environment was slowing the business down, bringing several critical issues to light:
  • A lack of real-time information and insights into the IT automation environment meant that IT was learning of job failures long after the job had failed;
  • An inability to pass dependencies and data between jobs and processes from disparate technologies was making the IT environment overly complex;
  • A reliance on scripting to integrate new technologies was slowing down the development and management of business processes.



 

By The Numbers

8

Amec’s IT team was able to replace 8 separate utilities with a single, prebuilt, ActiveBatch job step.

99.8%

Job completion rates at Amec Foster Wheeler reached 99.8% following the migration to ActiveBatch.

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Amec Foster Wheeler Implements ActiveBatch

Amec deployed ActiveBatch in 2009, expanding access to 15 developers and 10 operators, simplifying the IT environment with powerful new capabilities:

  • The ActiveBatch Extension for Microsoft Dynamics AX enabled Amec to consolidate several internal departments into a single ERP system, streamlining critical processes;
  • ActiveBatch's Integrated Jobs Library provides hundreds of prebuilt jobs, including and Import Job Step that allowed Amec to consolidate eight command-line utilities;
  • ActiveBatch’s event-automation triggers allow Amec to run processes dynamically to better meet needs in real-time, as opposed to using only inflexible, static schedules and manual triggers;
  • Runtime monitoring capabilities notify the IT team whenever a job is running longer than expected, allowing Amec to investigate delays before they turn into failed jobs.

In Their Own Words

"We needed to consolidate and gain all the operational advantages associated with having a single, enterprise-wide view of our batch processes."

"That's the advantages associated with consolidating multiple automation tools into a single solution. It provides us with that 360-degree view of our scheduling and simplifies the management and monitoring of all the individual processes that comprise it."

“We took an entire plan and replaced it with one drag-and-drop Job Step…. With ActiveBatch, we’ve replaced all that complexity and made the execution of these utilities far more reliable as well.”

“The ActiveBatch Job Step makes it much easier to manage these configurations than the built-in SSIS configurations mechanism, which is problematic to say the least.”

How Amec Foster Wheeler Succeeded with ActiveBatch

Consolidated multiple scheduling tools and utilities by positioning ActiveBatch as a central point of control and monitoring for multiple environments.

Development environments are automatically synchronized with production environments, ensuring that developers are always working with the latest builds.

Reliability and workload completion rates improved significantly as Amec relied more on ActiveBatch and less on Windows Task Scheduler and SQL Server Agent.

ActiveBatch Alerts provide immediate notification of job failures and issues.
    


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