What Is Whataburger?
Industry: Food, Restaurants
Location: Southern United States
Whataburger, Inc., one of the most treasured restaurant chains in the Southern U.S., chose ActiveBatch Workload Automation from Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. to manage its batch and data center processes at the company’s central data center. In addition to driving most of its central data processing needs, Whataburger anticipates using ActiveBatch in the future to facilitate sales and cash analysis on a near-real time basis at its over 700 restaurants.
Since its first restaurant opened in 1950, Whataburger’s signature orange-and-white striped A-frame roofs have been a part of the Southern landscape. Its stores stretch from Arizona to Florida, offering a full menu of burgers, chicken sandwiches, salads, breakfast entrees and more.
“While Whataburger stores still offer the friendly service and made-to-order food made famous by Harmon Dobson in 1950, the company’s back-office business systems are strictly 21st century,” said John Player, Group Director of Information Services. “ActiveBatch will be the key scheduling component that handles all batch processing in Whataburger’s central data center.”
Meeting Real-Time Data Needs
As companies move to real-time information processing, solutions like ActiveBatch are the essential applications linchpin, notes Jim Manias, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Advanced Systems Concepts. “ActiveBatch ensures proper scheduling, execution, and reporting of virtually any kind of batch processing operation,” Manias said. “Where such operations used to be conducted overnight or during off hours, the immediate nature of business today requires a much more sophisticated and immediate solution. ActiveBatch delivers that capability.”
For Whataburger, ActiveBatch is managing execution of functions both within and between a number of critical business systems and data sources. “Our data center employs the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne business suite as well as Informatica PowerCenter, MicroStrategy, Gauss document management and several custom SQL data transformation service packages. These various systems touch virtually every department in our company,” said John Player. “With ActiveBatch we will be able to design and match the various job streams between these applications much easier.”
ActiveBatch can schedule and trigger jobs via its event automation architecture, which includes triggers such as IT events, constraints or more traditional date and time scheduling. The product is a proven solution, designed to be customer installable and accommodating applications for Windows, AIX, Linux, Sun Solaris, OpenVMS, HP-UX and HP Tru64 Unix. It also utilizes many industry and/or Microsoft standards and features in order to provide the best balance for a reduced learning curve and a positive ROI for acquisition and ongoing operations.
Since the initial implementation of ActiveBatch in Q1 of 2005, Whataburger is experiencing improved performance in its batch and data warehousing automation. The company is currently looking at ways to extend the platform into back office systems at the individual restaurant level.