Children's Hospital & Medical Center Consolidates Multiple Job Schedulers with ActiveBatch

An ActiveBatch Workload Automation Success Story

Children’s handles over 350,000 patients a year, generating a massive amount of data to be processed and delivered to hundreds of employees around the hospital. However, Children’s lacked the job scheduling capabilities that would support long-term growth:
  • An inability to institute automatic restarts meant that one failed job would create a domino effect of failed jobs that, without central monitoring, was difficult to resolve;
  • A lack of event-based scheduling forced IT to schedule jobs based on potential overruns, creating downtime that occupied important resources;
  • Large, end-of-month reports had to be manually run in an Access database, taking IT away from higher-value tasks and diminishing the database’s performance over time.
  • Children’s relied on manual operations, custom scripts, and several basic job schedulers to manage data in a complex, distributed environment. Children’s implemented ActiveBatch to unify and manage its fragmented data warehousing and report delivery resources.

By The Numbers

>50

By automating Talend ETL jobs, downloading reports, and building Excel spreadsheets, Children’s has saved staff over 50 hours a year.

>40

Children’s uses a single, prebuilt, secure file protocol Job Step to automate over 40 different file transfer processes with over 40 third-party vendors.

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Children's Implements ActiveBatch

The ActiveBatch Integrated Jobs Library has allowed Children’s to replace old scripts with prebuilt Job Steps for SQL Server, accelerating development and maintenance.

  • ActiveBatch is used to execute PowerShell scripts, centralizing the management of numerous administrative tasks and simplifying troubleshooting when it’s needed.
  • By using ActiveBatch to consolidate the work of multiple schedulers, data management requires far fewer manual interventions, reducing errors while saving time and resources.
  • File-based triggers allow the accounting department to run reports as required, providing self-service and reducing time-to-insight while bypassing the Access database.

In Their Own Words

“While most of our packages run on Windows, UNIX and Linux are used a lot. We realized ActiveBatch would integrate with all these platforms, allowing us to handle all our workflows —including non-BI-related tasks— through one source.”

“We have yet to find a vendor that uses some sort of a secure file transfer method that ActiveBatch doesn’t support.”

“ActiveBatch’s reliability, flexibility, and scheduling power has turned around our delivery methodology, allowing our people to focus on higher-level tasks.”

“Failures don’t require a dive-in anymore. When there’s a problem —a much less frequent occurrence these days— we can quickly ascertain the cause and correct it.”

How Children's Succeeded with ActiveBatch

By consolidating multiple schedulers into one unified application, Children’s has simplified its IT environment, making it easier to support growing database demands.

Intuitive workflow automation has allowed Children’s to accomplish more with the same number of employees, allowing them to cut the costs of third-party script development.

ActiveBatch’s secure file protocol Job Step has allowed Children’s to build workflows that automate over 40 different file transfer processes with more than 40 vendors.

File constraints within ActiveBatch ensure that all feeder systems are updated before ETL processes begin, ensuring that all reports are accurate and up-to-date.
  


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