Real-Time Data Allows Lamar Advertising to Launch Its Digital Billboards

An ActiveBatch Workload Automation Success Story

The digital billboard meant big changes for Lamar Advertising, one of the largest outdoor ad companies in the world. Lamar needed real-time data transfers and efficient computer processing in order to adapt, but its homegrown job scheduler could not keep up:
  • New tools couldn’t be integrated without time-consuming custom scripts and manual workarounds, making the automation framework complex and difficult to transform;
  • A lack of processing power meant an inability to process data transfers in real-time;
  • Custom scripts were required for routine business tasks and day-to-day IT processes;
  • Costs associated with managing and maintaining the homegrown scheduler were rising as team members spent increasing time and resources on custom scripts.

By The Numbers

3.6m

Lamar has been able to expand its daily Job load, running anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 jobs a day. That's 3.6 - 4.4 million jobs per year. 

99%

Lamar has a 99% success rate for the jobs it runs through ActiveBatch.

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Lamar Advertising Implements ActiveBatch

Lamar needed a workload automation solution that would seamlessly integrate new tools and technologies while handling continuous, real-time data. To meet these needs, Lamar implemented ActiveBatch and now leverages many of its capabilities:

  • ActiveBatch’s Integrated Jobs Library, featuring hundreds of prebuilt job steps and integrations, enabled Lamar to centralize processes from across the IT environment;
  • Virtually all jobs are now built with job templates, drastically reducing the time spent writing scripts and simplifying the maintenance of existing workflows;
  • ActiveBatch is used to automate secure file transfers for financial institutions and handle payment processing from customers;
  • ActiveBatch is used for data warehousing and ETL processes to generate reports for IT and business end-users, accelerating time to data.

In Their Own Words

“ActiveBatch allows us to get a better handle on what we’re running nightly. It also manages near-real time tasks like our webcam updates, which are refreshed continually, 24 hours a day. Now everything is handled with one very flexible, centralized solution.”

“By eliminating the need to write scripts for our scheduled tasks, we can focus our IT resources on our core outdoor advertising business. We have more time for operations, which makes our IT organization a lot nimbler.”

“We’ve made heavy use of the Integrated Jobs Library, which has given us a lot more time back that we used to spend creating and maintaining scripts.”

“ActiveBatch handles the complexity in our environment very well, without limitation.”

How Lamar Advertising Succeeded with ActiveBatch

Drastically reduced the time and resources Lamar had previously spent on scripting, allowing IT to focus on core business processes and to achieve people resource savings.

ActiveBatch manages continuous, real-time data transfers from Lamar’s 24/7 digital billboards.

Significantly reduced errors in the accounts receivable process, among other processes.

Changes to jobs are now applied to groups of jobs instead of individual jobs, drastically reducing the amount of manual work required to maintain automated processes.


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