ActiveBatch proves to be a flexible and easy-to-use solution for automating workflows. The inclusion of a drag-and-drop interface and impressive integration features significantly simplify the process of creating workflows. 

The predefined steps for task automation greatly enhance convenience. The capability to effortlessly establish connections with servers, applications, and services offers the opportunity to seamlessly collaborate with other software concurrently. 

Any large business or organization that wants to manage its workload effectively and with the least amount of room for error might choose the ActiveBatch Automation tool.

Team members with expertise in different tools and server processors are working and monitoring the project via a centralized platform, which means the processes are now agile and instant correction or remediations are being made on the same. This is helping us accelerate and save time, money, and effort.

The user interface is the cherry on the cake as it facilitates simple steps such as drag and drop and scheduling the job. This enables any team member to get accustomed to the tool as quickly as possible.

Implementing this solution has been a real improvement in the work we do. This tool helps reduce the manual workload, and operational skills have been reduced as well. Now, the focus is more on developmental and deployment work.

Also, since this work has a multiplatform tool for scheduling, the jobs across platforms have been easy to handle. This has reduced a lot of micro-managing on these apps, and the amount of manual work is also reduced.

Plus, since the scalability is also automated, the team has benefitted when growing.

We have very strict SLAs that require us to generate reports out of the production data on a daily and weekly basis. We, as a support team, are being monitored for any SLA breaches. ActiveBatch has been very stable and has been only affected by database performance or network issues.

As the interactions between ActiveBatch and other tools are automated in the best way possible, it gives us more time to focus on other things. For any job failures or other issues, the logs generated are very easy to figure out the issue and the Root cause for the same.

ActiveBatch has been providing us with the central automation hub for scheduling, alerting, and monitoring, bringing everything together under a single pane of glass.

We have some critical processes in ActiveBatch that go to finance and to the auditors in our organization. Those processes are highly critical because that allows us to trade. If those reports don't get to them, we get penalized by the government or by APRA or by some financial institutions. ActiveBatch, in this particular case, is absolutely critical for getting those reports out.

We have SLAs requiring us to get reports out by a certain time of day or by a certain day of the month, by a certain time. We're judged on whether those reports go out. ActiveBatch, being as stable as it, is only impacted by external factors like the network and database performance. But otherwise, we are quite comfortable with the way ActiveBatch is able to handle these jobs without our having to look at them.

Because the connections between ActiveBatch and other tools are automated, it gives us more time to do other things, and more interesting things. If something goes wrong, we can go back and have a look in the logs that are produced and that explain what's going on, and we can then repair it. It's an enabler, and it provides us with more time to get on with other jobs. It's something that's critical and it runs by itself and we're really happy it does that. We have that time available because we're not actually manually babysitting processes.

It provides a central automation hub for scheduling and monitoring, bringing everything together under a single pane of glass, absolutely. There is finance, sales, marketing. Pretty much every department has a job that we deal with. It's quite heavily integrated into our whole stack. As an insurance company, our major events department, for example, is critical because every time there's a storm or a hail event or a cyclone somewhere, those reports must get out in a timely manner. I can't think of any department that isn't impacted by ActiveBatch, running some report for them.

The single pane of glass helps the DataOps team manage all of the processes that are supported by ActiveBatch as the main scheduling tool. We've created a dashboard which pulls information from ActiveBatch, information that we can share with the organization. They can look at jobs and the schedules and, if necessary, run their own jobs from that point. It's like the lungs of our company.

Overall, it has helped to improve workflow completion times by 70 to 80 percent, easily. Once you've built a job, it just runs and no one has to concern themselves with it doing what it's doing. They will get the notification or the file or the email that says it's processed and they move on with their day.

In addition, we had a guy who was spending seven hours in a week to extract, compile, and then export information into a CSV file, and then another few hours to get it transferred to another department. We were able to build a PowerShell script, with a query that could easily be updated, that was automated through ActiveBatch. It takes 10 minutes to run. What that guy was doing in hours, we are now doing within minutes.

ActiveBatch supports 250 municipalities around the USA for parking enforcement. In addition to that, there are almost another 200 that we support. They just go out and find out who owned the vehicle that had the violation, whether it be a toll road violation or a parking violation. There are a lot of moving pieces which are supported by ActiveBatch every day.

Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis. We can set tasks for daily, monthly, or weekly runs. 

This powerful and reliable tool can be implemented in small businesses and large enterprises that are looking to automate their IT workloads. 

It is used to trigger tasks at specified frequencies, We have also integrated ActiveBatch with different services and applications.

ActiveBatch has reduced work by providing automated workflows across several different applications. ActiveBatch also has some of the triggers, such as FTP file triggers, message queue triggers, and so on, to run jobs sequentially, making sure they will be handled in a reliable way. 

It sets up alerts for operational peace of mind. It also has custom rules that we can apply to advanced data/time scheduling and fiscal calendar. 

The best feature that it has solved is the ability to trigger jobs upon completion of warehouse nightly batch jobs.

My team consists of five associates. We mainly deal with pricing, sales operations, reporting, forecasting, and several other analytics.

The use of ActiveBatch has made all our lives easy by automating a lot of manual repetitive tasks that we do on a daily basis. We save hours and effort aand gain a high accuracy rate.

Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch.

It has enabled us to work on multiple platforms at the same with its capability to integrate with other applications and web services.

My organization's IT operations have been made more efficient by Active Batch, which automates time-consuming, repetitive procedures. The active batch may assist in making sure that crucial activities are carried out in the proper sequence and at the appropriate time with the use of features like job dependencies, event triggers, and notifications. 

Additionally, the software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows. 

Overall, the software helps organizations improve the reliability and performance of their IT systems.

ActiveBatch helped us automate and schedule routine tasks such as data backups, file transfers, database updates, and report generation, which frees IT staff to focus on other studies.

As an IT department, we do solutions for the entire business and control everything. Our nightly cycles affect everybody in the company, so we do have some jobs that we run in one department, then create output which goes to another department. Based on email distribution lists, we can let anybody in the company know when things run.

We don't really use ActiveBatch for sharing knowledge. It's more for sharing output. We have some processes that run SSRS reports that distribute links to many people across the organization all at once, so they all get the same data fed to them simultaneously.

The most complex process that we run is our nightly cycle, which is made up of about 230 individual jobs triggered based on other jobs completing or files showing up in the system. It integrates a mixture of executables, a third-party policy system called LifePRO, and PeopleSoft. With all the handshaking back and forth between the systems, it allows an operator to start a job at around eight o'clock at night. Then, at around two in the morning, the last job finish with very minimal interaction from the operator, who is more sitting there watching to see if a job fails or not.

The operator used to run a job for our nightly cycles and go off doing something, then they would come back to see if the job was finished. If it was, they would start the next job. With the operator's intervention, this entire process would run for around eight hours. We have managed to streamline that down, because we're no longer waiting for an operator to look for a job completion, to run in about five hours. This allows us to have one nighttime operator instead of two, so we have cut the number of staff at night in half.

Additionally, daytime jobs are what we are starting to focus on now to allow our daytime operators to basically sit there and watch different jobs run. We'll be retraining both the nighttime and daytime operators to do different jobs. For example, with our nighttime operator, while the job is running in the background, she doesn't have to do anything anymore. She has now been tasked with other systems, like upgrading servers, and doing other things that cannot be done when the majority of our staff are in the building. So, not only have we removed half of our nighttime staff, we have repurposed our one person whose there to do both jobs.

Internally, we ran a number of executables. Our operators used to run these jobs all manually and press buttons within our console. Now, all those processes are automated. The operator doesn't do anything. We have a number of reports that just get generated automatically throughout the course of the night or based on their own dependency. The operators used to have to wait for a specific job to finish before they could do all these pieces. Currently, those just automatically trigger on their own. In addition to that, with our financial system, PeopleSoft, we can call any job within it automatically. This is without our operators even opening up the PeopleSoft console. In our LifePRO policy system, we have about 150 jobs that we can call those automatically as well, including some daytime jobs that run processes every five minutes. Instead of having the operator sit there like Homer Simpson pressing a button, these jobs trigger automatically, ensuring that all the data is kept updated in real-time.

It is a system that calls other jobs. Therefore, it will return error codes from those other systems. If it's a job that is truly an ActiveBatch job and doing biomanipulation, it will return error codes. The logs associated with those error codes are usually pretty in-depth to let you know exactly what happened. This prevented problems from becoming fires. We have an email that goes out every day with a list of all the jobs that failed to ensure that we hit every single one and can take care any issues.

We have one job that runs every 30 minutes, handling batch input into our system. If one of those jobs fails, then it keeps the rest of them from working the rest of the day. Then, if one of those fails, the entire team that supports that is notified immediately, giving them the full amount of time to rectify the issue before the next time that process runs. In the past, when this was done manually, we would have to wait for someone to notice that there was an error and then find the right person to deal with it. Now, within 10 seconds, an email has been sent out saying, "There is an issue. Fix it."

For our nightly cycles, we have some cycles that will run from start to finish without a single error because it is controlling when jobs run. It does a lot of clean up before the system starts. Therefore, it knows where certain files are supposed to be and where they are. So, we don't have to worry about somebody clicking the wrong button; everything runs from start to finish.

ActiveBatch has improved our organization by making job scheduling and API integrations very easy to use and to get started with. Earlier, we needed to assign these tasks to a high-paying highly-skilled resource. Now, we can train anyone to do the same job with very little effort. Our operation costs are significantly reduced because of ActiveBatch. Now, anyone can complete automation tasks without much knowledge of how computer API works and with no knowledge of coding. This has made our automation easier.

It helped to schedule and monitor the SAP ECC batch jobs.

It reduced the workload.

It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems. Once the job is scheduled, no manual interruption is required. Therefore, once the job is scheduled, there won't be any interruption to the job.

As we support the different countries in the project, we need to schedule jobs in different time zone; this tool helped to schedule the jobs as per the respective time zone because this tool contains almost all the time zones. We can schedule jobs as per the regional/country time.

We use it company-wide. With us being a financial organization, we rely on a bunch of data from some of our parent companies that process transactions for us. We are able to bring all that data into our system, no matter what department it is from, e.g., we have things from the IT department that we want to do maintenance on, such as clearing out the logs in IAS on the Exchange Server, to being able to move millions of dollars with automation.

If there is a native tool for it, then we try to use it. We have purchased the SharePoint, VMware, and ServiceNow modules. Wherever we find that we can't connect in because the native APIs aren't there, we have been using PowerShell to strip those rows out into an array of variables that have worked pretty well. So far, we have not found a spot where we can't hook in to have it do the tasks that we are asking it to do.

We have only really tapped into SharePoint native integration because we haven't gotten to the depths of being able to use the ServiceNow and some of the other integrations. However, being able to use the native plugins has been very helpful. It saves us from having to write a PowerShell script to do the functionality that we are looking to do. We are really trained to write it, because within the old process that we used to use, we would do a lot of PowerShell as the old tool just wouldn't do what we're asking it to do. We are finding a lot of processes within ActiveBatch are now replacing those PowerShell scripts because ActiveBatch can just do it. We don't have to teach it how to do it.

We can do things within ActiveBatch, not having to teach it everything. That is the biggest thing that we've been learning with it: It's easy to use and its workflows work a lot better. The other day, we ran into a problem where Citrix ShareFile, which is one of our SFTP locations, was being stupid where it would disconnect from the SFTP server. It was all just a time out. Well, ActiveBatch has a process included where we can troubleshoot the connection failures and have itself heal enough to be able to get the data off of the SFTP server. Being able to discover the functionalities of ActiveBatch self-healing has been a lifesaver for us.

We have so many different processes out there with so many different schedules. My boss looked at it one day and noticed there was somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 processes a day. The solution gives us that single pane of glass to see everything under one spot because we have four execution agents constantly running, so there are processes happening at all times of the day and night.

We are actively monitoring all our ActiveBatch processes using SolarWinds Orion. If a process doesn't run, a service is not running on one particular execution agent, etc., Orion will alert us to that. I don't think that we have set up anything too major within ActiveBatch to figure out what is going on. I know that we have HA across everything. So, we are running four execution agents and two jobs schedulers. Having all that stuff put together, then it does failover to the other location if there is a problem with one of the sites.

We found that the solution created simplicity for us with our workflows and process automation. It gives me the folder and job name, then I'm done. I don't have to remember a plethora of things and that makes life a lot easier. Once you get it setup and have it configured, you don't have to remember it anymore. It allows you to focus on doing the right thing. 

I find it super flexible. Every time that I ask if the solution can do something, they say, "Yes." I have not been able to come up with a challenge so far that they have not been able to do.

It definitely allows the ability to develop the workflow. It has reduced the amount of coding. Some groups don't pay attention to that, as they are very much an old school group. I am trying to get people to do things differently, but that's just changing habits.

One process may at some point time run across five different servers in parellel before coming back to a final point of finishing. They built that in, where it say, "Every time we do certain things, execute this package." All I have to do is drag that package into the master package and master plan. It's very modular. 

All our workflows are efficient. This solution allows for tighter integrations across environments where you don't necessarily want developers cross pollinating each others' code. It's more or less about securing code. I have people who are experts in doing PowerCenter. They don't have any idea what they're doing in other solutions. You don't want them accidentally editing the wrong code. Therefore, it helps keep related things isolated, but allows them to communicate.

For code maintenance, it's really simplified it. For things that are coded, like day-to-day Unix or Windows level batch type jobs, this means I don't have to rewrite the code and I can easily migrate it from the environment. I can do this by leveraging variables and naming practices. I can basically develop code, do development, migrate it through our four environments, and not made changes to the code at all. It makes the environmental passback of an SDLC process seamless.

We have to monitor our backup servers on a daily basis, creating dump files and verifying all the active master servers that have gotten at least one dump parsing data entry. It's helped with checking servers with error status and analyze/fix/report and monitoring for the latest dump files in the server. These were the most time-consuming tasks and required more attention. Active Batch has helped us to automate these tasks by reducing resource usage and giving us more time for extra productive hours other than monitoring. We are able to track down the server failures easily and fix the issue within the SLA targets thereby achieving effective and improved business processes.

ActiveBatch has really improved our project by automating the endpoint security scans on our servers and also other components of our environment. 

Being a security project we should have a complete picture of the health of each and every component as well as the servers that need to be upgraded to avoid any malware attacks on non-upgraded servers due to existing vulnerabilities. This has saved associates a number of critical business hours that can be used to concentrate on critical business tasks rather than spending them performing repetitive security scans.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a super robust application FOR Regular SQL tasks or other file maintenance which in turn can help us to free up the time that we spend on working on repetitive tasks. Approximately ~25 hours of manual effort has been reduced to ~5 hours.

It also offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc.

ActiveBatch has made our lives very easy by automating a lot of features which has led to fewer errors and more accuracy.

ActiveBatch has allowed us to move forward quickly with our modernization effort, to get off of the mainframe and to move that data to a distributed environment. It has been huge for us to use ActiveBatch to run these nightly processes: everything from Dev to QA, UAT, and Production. Those are all cycles that we run every night to allow different users to test processes that they're working on in each of those stages, to get them into production and off the mainframe.

With the systems we're using now, it's a lot easier with ActiveBatch. The mainframe is so manual. If there's a problem with some mainframe code, it requires a call to a developer, but our new system works great with ActiveBatch because everything is built into that system. There's no JCL code or mainframe COBOL code, up front. Our batches just work seamlessly between ActiveBatch and our new administration system. We've had no problem with our batch processing from that point of view. Whereas with the mainframe, it's a struggle at times. If we have a problem with a job and it cancels, we may be waiting three hours for a developer to get online, troubleshoot, test, and get a fix in place so we can finish the cycle. We've not had that issue with ActiveBatch.

I'd like to share positive feedback on this, since the negative side is so minor. On the positive side, this tool is very much necessary for all manufacturing and production companies, and I strongly recommend it as the uses and functions of this tool are vast and can be used in almost all departments in the organization, including stores, business development, SCM, purchase, PPC, manufacturing, quality, finance, program management, and so on.

It has definitely improved my working culture by easily getting the job done.

There were more than 20 bots developed for the closure of tickets, and every bot has to be run on different environments. Using ActiveBatch has improved our job scheduling and reduced the manual effort of closing similar kinds of tickets. This way, operation costs are significantly reduced. Anyone can now run the bots and complete the automation work with zero knowledge.

We work with different time zones. This tool helped to schedule the jobs irrespective of a timeframe as this tool supports all time zones, and the jobs are scheduled accordingly.

It's really helpful with scheduling and setting up dependencies. I primarily use it with our data warehouse and there are a lot of dependencies. First you have to load XYZ tables before it's filtered and presented in the reporting layer. It really helps to maintain those constraints and dependencies.

We use it to schedule our data warehouse. We use the Informatica PowerCenter tool and we have Oracle's out-of-the-box Data Warehouse so there are a lot of workflows that need to run, either sequentially or that are dependent on one another. ActiveBatch really handles hundreds of workflows on a schedule and it definitely maintains those constraints. I've never seen a failure to trigger a job at an appropriate time. We definitely rely on it heavily in that regard.

ActiveBatch was originally purchased as a scheduler, to enable us to execute DataStage jobs, but once we started to grow, and our use cases started to vary, we realized that we could use the pre-built SFTP capabilities. Previously, we had to code things in our DataStage tool where it wasn't as intuitive. You really had to get into the programming. But a business user can certainly use ActiveBatch to set up an SFTP connection, as long as they have the information. It's pretty easy to do that. Moving SFTP files around is certainly valuable to the business because I work for a hospital. The health system is definitely reliant on the data that we move around, and ActiveBatch really executes the ETL workflows that actually transform and move the data. We rely on it to appropriately schedule and execute those workflows to get the data to the right place.

The solution has become our center of excellence for all things related to automation in our organization. We started with DataStage and then we acquired the Informatica tool and we use ActiveBatch for that. Now we're seeing we can use the scheduling capabilities of ActiveBatch to call our Qlik refresh applications. We're starting to expand ActiveBatch as an enterprise solution and other departments are also finding that they can do all the remote scripting that they used to have to do manually, or that operations would have to do, in ActiveBatch and it will take care of that on a schedule, instead of wasting man-hours.

It also provides proactive error detection, even in real time. Almost all of our workflows have a lot of notifications set up to either email, or page, or create a ServiceNow ticket if there is a failure. We're notified immediately if something's not working as it should. That has prevented problems from becoming fires. If we didn't get those notifications, if our data warehouse was not operating as we expected it to, that certainly would cause some problems. 

In addition, in terms of workflow completion times, I don't know what we would have done without it, as far as scheduling goes. It would probably be a lot more complicated to schedule a lot of our workflows through these other products that are more focused on the data manipulation and are not as concerned with scheduling. So to be able to schedule and set up dependencies has been pretty valuable for us. It has improved our workflow completion rates by five hours per day, because we execute our workflows daily. It has also reduced our man-hours by something like 60 percent. It has a lot of intuitive stuff so that instead of building out code for it, we can just plug-and-play with it. You put in the right parameters and it takes care of it for you.

We have definitely been able to re-assign staff to more value-added activities as a result of using ActiveBatch. Something that has been very valuable for us is that we have been able to build our solutions in a way that, if they fail, ActiveBatch actually tries to restart them itself, without any manual intervention. If that fails it goes to our operations team. Before, that was something that our ETL or data integration team had to handle ourselves. Being able to push those issues to ActiveBach and to the other team, it has really saved us a lot of time.

The automation has saved us many hours although I can't say exactly how many.

We're able to create workflows without coding.

I would imagine it has also resulted in an improvement in workflow completion times as well.

Our IT organization is using it for monitoring. We get information by running checks using ActiveBatch to obtain information to provide to the monitoring systems. It helps us keep systems up and to receive early warning about problems.

Active Batch has helped us in a lot of ways. For example, earlier, the process was very time-consuming, and we needed to always have some resources to monitor everything. We needed a resource to schedule, and the entire workflow was not easy. With ActiveBatch, we schedule the tasks automatically and monitor them efficiently to track the tasks in real-time. Mainly, we have streamlined our entire IT operations. Now, we don't always need a resource to schedule or manage things. It does its tasks on its own, and even we can track and audit them efficiently and effectively.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation improved the organization I worked in because it's able to manage complex workflow automation even with a lot of cross-dependencies and hundreds of processes running. ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a very good tool in the Windows environment.

Before we had ActiveBatch, we used the Informatica Workflow Scheduler, and we would have to start a downstream workflow, but have it wait for the completion of the first one by a trigger file. So "Workflow B" would be waiting for a control file that said "Workflow A" is done. If we had to do reruns — sometimes we would create a control file by mistake and that would throw off the next day's run — and we'd have to do manual reruns. With ActiveBatch, it's very easy to say, "Workflow A is done, run B," and onward: "Run C, Run D," as soon as they're done. You don't need to worry about whether a control file was created, or how long is the job going to wait for. It gives you much simpler and easy-to-understand control of the flow of jobs, as they run.

Using ActiveBatch hasn't really reduced our code base because we would be developing these workflows in Informatica if we weren't using ActiveBatch. But the scheduling and integration into the batch schedule for something new are much simpler and save us a little bit of time, now that we have everything developed, for the most part. We may go a month without adding anything to our schedule and we may go four or five months without adding anything to the schedule, but it gives us an easier understanding of the flow of the data and helps us make sure dependencies are met in a more straightforward fashion than through the Informatica scheduler.

ActiveBatch hasn't really improved our job success rate percentage. If a job fails, we still get our failure messages from Informatica, and in some cases from ActiveBatch. The biggest benefit is that the biggest issue we were having was the timing of all of the downstream applications from the warehouse, and it has greatly improved that.

And it has saved man-hours, although it has not reduced headcount. It has saved man-hours in that situation when we would have issues and our old scheduling solution would break down because of them. This allows us to not have to worry about how to start the downstream applications, based on the warehouse. I would estimate it saves us about 20 hours per month.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is truly a powerful tool when it comes to automation. The way we manage work has completely changed after using this tool. 

Execution of workflows has become smooth and simple. The overall result after using ActiveBatch at our organization is fabulous. The business processes have improved more than ever before. 

The user interface is really incredible. It is easy to use even with limited technical expertise. This tool allows us to create any type of complex workflow with ease. 

Built-in job steps and integrations are some of the best features of ActiveBatch. This single feature has saved a lot of time for me. Real-time monitoring ensures that the user is aware of the status of the workflows. 

ActiveBatch Workload Automation has truly been a transformative solution for my organization. 

It has completely changed the work environment. It has made work much easier and faster. The time taken by the tasks to get executed has gradually decreased over time. 

Managing the complex workflows and arranging the job processes has become easier. The platform handles a wide range of automation tasks, ranging from simple job scheduling processes to complex processes. 

The integration capabilities and reliability of the software are exceptional. 

The built-in templates have been of great help in speeding up the automation processes.

Earlier, we had around four to five different tools to manage our automation which was all replaced by ActiveBatch. It is great. Even the resources required to manage those tools were reduced to a great extent and now, with only two employees, we are managing end-to-end automation. 

Our team is mainly into the automation of the entire application which usually takes around 20 minutes to complete. When ActiveBatch was used, it was done in less than five minutes. We were able to complete it before the deadlines we had and even our clients are happy with the results we produced.

We have some things coded out to execute processes on systems internal to us, but nothing out of the cloud. We have web based products that are internal and made available to our internal users. We have some external users who use these web based products. We control those from within ActiveBatch where we do remote logins and can control some of the processes. This is for internal and external clients' availability.

It reduces the load and manual efforts on everybody's parts. With a thousand jobs running on a daily basis, it allows our programming staff to focus on other things rather than deal with manual programming efforts, taking quite a load off our programming staff. 

The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes have to be made. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially. 

Automated integrations have helped us build end-to-end workflows. When we send an ACH to the bank, it used to be that a report would had been generated, then somebody had to call the bank and provide the bank with the totals. We are calculating all that now within ActiveBatch, then sending an automated email to the bank informing them of what is contained within the actual ACH. This has eliminated the need for several people in accounting or finance to have to deal with this work. It runs flawlessly. Though, it took a while to develop, it's a good case example.

We do have FTP file triggers and file triggers internally. We don't have to wait for somebody to say, "Hey, we've posted a file. Can you process it?"  The nice thing about ActiveBatch is we can specifically look for triggers, pick stuff up, and process it the minute it hits. So, it takes that step out of the equation of using internal or external people, and asking, "Something's been posted. Can you take care of it?" Instead, it's done and out of the way. This reduces delays.

The biggest example of the way it has improved things — and this is actually why we moved to ActiveBatch — is that most of our jobs are our processes that run overnight. That's the critical time for us because we have to load and calculate this data overnight so that the clients can have it in the morning. Our old automation tool would frequently have jobs that just failed, with no reason given. It would not track the history, so there was no way to determine if there was a pattern of failure. And it was difficult to restart jobs. That's what moved us to ActiveBatch: knowing that the job is going to run, and that if it does fail it's going to give adequate information as to why it failed. Typically, any failure in our case is data-related or due to code on our side. Rarely has it ever been an issue with ActiveBatch itself. Having that stability, especially doing our overnight processing, is the biggest benefit to our business from using ActiveBatch.

If you're a programmer, you can certainly write out scripts and design jobs that are similar to programs. But a lot of our technicians who use it do not have a programming background, and it's simply a matter of using the templates that are already provided. You do not have to have any kind of programming background to be able to use the software. 

While we've never had a whole lot of scripting done, even with our old tool, with ActiveBatch it's very easy to have junior employees log into the system. They can learn how to create jobs. It's definitely something that's accessible by more junior level employees, as well as senior level.

It also has the capability for event-driven automation to trigger workflows based on specific emails, file events, FTP file triggers, message queues, date database modifications, tweets, etc. For us, the big one is a file trigger, when a file arrives on our FTP server in a certain location. We'll occasionally use a database trigger as well. And we use the scheduling capability that it has to run a job at a certain date and time. These abilities have definitely increased efficiency and reduced delays. It's mainly from the stability of the automation. Even with the old software, it had that same capability, but it just wasn't as reliable. It would just have odd failures that we never could quite explain, and the vendor could not either. ActiveBatch, having that stability and being able to use those triggers to automatically trigger our jobs and get them running overnight, greatly enhances our efficiency. Having a team manually do those things would take much longer.

I don't know if I could quantify the improvement in job success rate percentage, but when I joined this particular department it was right around the time that the transition was being made from the old automation to ActiveBatch. What I do know is that there were enough failures and instability in the old automation tool to trigger moving to a new tool, which is ActiveBatch. Since then, we have not had those types of issues. It's very reliable and very stable which is exactly what we need. 

I would think there has been improvement in workflow completion times, just from the stability standpoint. The way we create and use jobs in ActiveBatch is similar to what we did before. If everything worked as designed, I imagine that the old tool and ActiveBatch would probably process things in the same timeframe. It's just that ActiveBatch is much more stable. There aren't as many failures. The speed factor, for what we use it for, would probably be similar with any automation tool because we use it for such straightforward, simple tasks. Based on all the other performance indicators, I would imagine it's just as fast, if not faster than other tools.

Because we're a pretty small company, using a tool like this doesn't necessarily reduce headcount, but it allows us to not have to add headcount.