Graymont Improves Job Success Rate from 30% to 95% with ActiveBatch

An ActiveBatch Workload Automation Success Story

Graymont, a leading provider of lime and stone products in North America, was relying on a collection of scripts and batch scheduling solutions to automate key ETL and BI processes. This “elemental” approach was causing a number of issues, including:
  • A lack of centralized monitoring and alerting that caused failed jobs to go unnoticed unless they were checked in the middle of the night;
  • Batch processing success rates were at 30% because Graymont was unable to automatically rerun failed jobs and was unable to build dependencies between jobs;
  • Insufficient date/time functionality was causing considerable downtime between tasks while platform-specific scheduling tools made it impossible to run parallel jobs across multiple servers.

By The Numbers

55%

By using ActiveBatch to dynamically assign jobs to execution agents based on demand, Graymont has reduced batch runtimes by 55%.

95%

With ActiveBatch, Graymont was able improve its batch processing success rate from 30% to over 95%.

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Graymont Implements ActiveBatch

Graymont needed a workload automation solution that would integrate with IBM Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) and enable the coordination of disparate solutions. Graymont was able to achieve this with ActiveBatch:

  • ActiveBatch’s System View made it easy to build end-to-end workflows with parallel jobs, completion triggers, and dependencies from multiple disparate tools;
  • ActiveBatch’s Queue Management capabilities dynamically select where a job will run based on scheduling algorithms, optimizing the use of computing resources;
  • The ActiveBatch Extension for Cognos BI allows Graymont to develop end-to-end workflows that streamline and simplify the creation of business reports;
  • The ActiveBatch Instances View enables users to diagnose and fix issues while the Operations Views enables users to correct workload bottlenecks, reducing slack time.

In Their Own Words

“Consolidating the scheduling of scripts, database tasks, and application processes such as Cognos into a centralized solution has proven invaluable.”

“During the POC process, the fact that I was able to use the ActiveBatch documentation to start building workflows without any assistance spoke volumes in terms of the ease of use and ease of implementation."

“We use ActiveBatch’s queue system to build plans that cover all data dependencies and the Generic Queue handles how many jobs run at once and which servers they run on.”

“The amount of code we have to maintain has been reduced to virtually nothing.”

How Graymont Succeeded with ActiveBatch

Graymont consolidated its scripts, database tasks, and application processes into a single centralized solution that provides monitoring and management for the whole environment.

Large improvements in productivity, including steep reductions in batch processing failures, due to drastic improvements in resource management and monitoring.

ActiveBatch’s Integrated Jobs Library, featuring hundreds of prebuilt jobs and integrations, has reduced Graymont’s reliance on time-consuming, error-prone scripts.
    
     
  
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