Primarily the biggest thing is giving visibility to what, in a lot of places I've worked in, are transparent, like invisible processes. You have this massive batch and, unless you have someone watching that and you have a place to have a single point of truth and say this is successful or not, it makes it very hard to trace things. With Tidal, you can say, "Hey, this is the objective notifications," and all the ones you explicitly want are checkboxes. It's easy to add those things in.

I don't think we could work without Tidal or a similar solution. We do tens of millions of jobs a month, and for somebody to try to manually launch them and watch them would be physically impossible. Given that it was 20 years ago that we implemented this, we haven't lived that life in a long time, and we've grown significantly since then.

Our MRP job stream is very complex, and it has a mission-critical report that needs to run on a daily basis. One of the first things that Tidal gave us was visibility into that report so that we would know how long it runs, and we would be able to monitor it. If there were any issues, we could resolve the issues and not affect the next day's manufacturing because we took care of the issue. 

Awas that the team had a requirement that they needed to submit multiple jobs after a single job ran. They would put them all into one big single-threaded queue, and all those jobs that were dependent on that first job would get queued up and they would run single-threaded. That's because, with jobs, you can't go from single-threaded to multi-threaded and back. With Tidal, we are able to have one job run. As soon as that job is done, we can submit about a hundred jobs. Those hundred jobs spawn and do hundreds of other jobs. After all those jobs are done, we have another single-threaded single job. We would've never been able to handle such complexity with any other scheduler that I know of. So, we are able to solve the business' needs and improve the performance of MRP just by going to Tidal.

Another example is that a lot of times, the jobs were submitted every five minutes. If you asked the reason for that, the answer was that a file might show up, and as soon as that file shows up, I want to kick off the process, and process that file. We changed it from every five-minute job. It now only submits when that file shows up. Using file events removed the confusion of when that job is going to run where somebody would go out there and submit it, and if it was every five minutes, they'd have to wait for five minutes. Now, they submit it, or they put the file out there, and within a minute, they get a response back that says, "We're done with the job, and it is processed." They were surprised at how that was possible. It is just a file event, and it only runs when it is needed. It is not run every five minutes. So, we don't have all this extra processing time or extra jobs out there doing absolutely nothing because there is nothing to do. So, that's another way it has changed the business.

It has made things more efficient. We went from one set of jobs running every five minutes to running just ten times a day, which was the max I had seen that job run. So, we've seen the need go down because we're able to be more efficient with the jobs that need to be processed. An increase in the number of jobs would only be because we've been able to take more jobs that someone was manually submitting. We showed them how to set up the process in Tidal, and all of a sudden, with Tidal, it is just easier to automate it.

We use the Dashboards feature. We have opened up Tidal. Previously, a lot of our other schedulers were very much IT-only. We're the ones who got in there and created weekly jobs, whereas now, we've pushed some of that functionality back to the business. They go out there and submit a job. We taught them how to schedule to submit that job, and then, they maintain that job. If there is an issue, we monitor it for them and help them to resolve it, which makes it much more of a team effort between the business and IT, rather than just IT supporting these jobs.

It is very easy to use the Dashboards feature. Basically, they log in and see their dashboards, and/or they can see all the jobs that are running. One of the key things that we need to do is secure it. I can't have somebody log in and see another system's jobs for two main reasons. The first one is that it would be confusing, and the second one is that I can't have that. I need to have it secured. So, on top of it being easy, it is also very secure where when they log in, they only see their set of jobs and their dashboards.

The Dashboards feature gives information about a job’s status. A lot of times, when there is an issue with a job, this is the starting point to figure out what the issue was. You can then go and see job logs. A lot of times people call and say, "I have a job, and when is it going to be done?" With Tidal, it is very easy to go look at Tidal and say, "This is when it started, or this is the expected time it is supposed to start, and here is the average that it has done for all the other jobs that it has run." So, there is a lot of information that people can get at this all-in-one spot. If they had to manually go look at it, they would've to go to multiple different spots to get all the information. Even then, how you read the data isn't exactly consistent? For example, I submit a job, but it goes into waiting status. According to JD Edwards, it is running, and then, at some point, it'll go into processing status. That's the actual time that it takes to run. If you look at the start time and the stop time, that'll be two hours. If you look at the amount of time it really took to process, it would be only about 10 minutes. It could have spent the rest of the time waiting. That's where Tidal gives you the ability to see the actual processing time of how long it is going to take to run.

The Dashboards feature offers self-service for business users with customized content. As it has become available, it has been used much more. They never had it before. So, they didn't know what they didn't have. Now that we're able to give it to them, they're liking what they see. Being able to customize it gives them more flexibility in what they want to see.

Tidal has a lot of adapters. We use the SQL adapter. We use it to connect to an iSeries. We use it to connect to FTP. We use it to connect to all of our Windows Servers. There is also an agent for ServiceNow. We don't use that yet, but one of our future plans is to use it. We have JD Edwards ReportsNow that, instead of using ReportsNow scheduler, is using Tidal for scheduling jobs and reporting. The power of Tidal is the fact that I can have one scheduler to schedule everything. I don't have to have a scheduler on each one of these systems. I can, but then I have to maintain it on all of those systems. Having it on one, and being able to control everything, makes integrations a lot easier because I can stop processes, do patching, and bring processes back up. If it is all in one system, it is nicer and easier to do.

It is very easy to integrate it with other technologies and processes. A lot of times, there are a couple of different ways to do the same thing, such as with JD Edwards Orchestrator. We found three different ways to integrate into orchestrations. One was by running a command line that makes use of the SoapUI. They also have a web service that's more of a generic web service, and then, they came out and wrote a specific interface into orchestration so that we could schedule orchestrations through Tidal. Because there are so many different ways to do it, that means it is pretty flexible. It was fairly easy to figure out a way to do it and test it. When they came out with the actual adapter for JD Edwards Orchestrator, that made it super easy.

Another big advantage is the fact that when we schedule a job we know that it will submit, and if there are any errors we will be notified and able to resolve them. That way we're being proactive instead of reactive.

If there's an error with a job, there is an alert with a PDF. In that alert, we can customize messaging to assist people in resolving it. If there is a specific file location that they need to look at, we can put a link to that file location. If it's something with logs, we can attach the logs to the email so they have one place to start looking. We can even attach work instructions to that email notification: "Hey, if this job errors out and you received this email, here are the steps to resolve." People don't have to go looking for that information. They can just start resolving it right away.

Tidal has also definitely helped to reduce at-night hours. It's able to monitor itself. If a job fails, we're able to resolve the job and let the customer know, instead of the customer calling us and saying, "Some job failed. Go fix it," and having to research it. It could save my team about an hour's worth of work in each of those situations.

Overall, it saves us about 20 hours of work each week, hours where we would have been stuck trying to determine what the issue was instead of having an alert that tells us exactly what the issue is.

People who are on the Client Manager were complaining about response issues. It's never been proven that a batch job is causing the issue, but they do find that so many things are hitting the database at the same time that they shut down the batch job that's running at the time. We've now been able to move our schedules around so that it can just run at night when everybody's off the system.

Also, after a while using Tidal it started to reduce weekend hours by not have to watch it constantly on the weekend. The only time we're really busy on a weekend, now, is when there is a major upgrade going on, as we usually do it on a Saturday or Sunday. But other than that, it's very quiet on the weekend. It has reduced overtime by 80 to 90 percent.

As of right now, the only time we really have overtime is planned overtime. Once a month, our network team applies the Microsoft security patching, so we have to pick a day, once a month to hold everything in the schedule. They then apply their security patches to all the Windows Servers. They bring the applications back up and we have to do a quick, sample test to make sure Tidal is okay. We then run a few jobs to make sure other things are okay and the business users have to check their applications and their data. At that point we turn the schedule back on for the weekend. It sounds like a lot but it only takes about an hour. Where we used to have two or three hours of overtime a week, now it's down to one hour a month.

In addition, our number of jobs has been growing steadily. We do about 1,100 to 1,200 jobs a day. We could go further but we have never really tested how many jobs we could do.

Tidal enables the administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them. 

We do have a logs tab that we go through. The errors point us in the right direction where we need to troubleshoot our issues. Depending on the issue, remediation does not take too long. 

With the varied features in the varied adapters provided, we use Tidal Enterprise Scheduler because we want everything to be scheduled in one place. Tidal provides that for us with its tools and varying platforms in our organization. Tidal provides all the connectors to the platforms. This is very useful because we don't want to look for another scheduler for scheduling certain jobs. We don't want to look at those schedules manually between platforms. With Tidal, we just need to maintain the dependency, ensure the job is on the platform, and make sure the predecessor runs. We just set this in Tidal and forget about it.

Sometimes, it does reduce overtime hours. It's not a full-blown automation tool, but we usually set up monitoring. In the olden days, people used to do this with shadow scripts, cron jobs, etc. Now, we are using Tidal and have a call-in mechanism that is triggered from it. So, we do use Tidal for certain automations.

One of the greatest automation tools for managing a company's workload is Tidal automation. The best thing is that it has a direct connection to the hub of our system, which powers everyday operations for more than 15,000 jobs. By completing all the repetitious chores quickly and accurately, it saves us a lot of time. 

It acts as a center for controlling, planning, and managing workflows, projects, and jobs, and includes, among other things, the ability to schedule tasks, manipulate data, and transfer files.

As per my experience in automation and job scheduling Tidal software is the easiest scheduler to use for creating schedules, jobs, and events. As it is Windows-based, most features are predefined and easy to apply and fix.

As far as the alerts are considered, if something breaks, after the threshold analysis, everybody would know about it, and then troubleshooting action can be taken. Ops Teams tasks have been simplified.

We have used Tidal Workload Automation to configure, communicate and integrate with a lot of different software and tools. We have used SQL Databases, AWS, Azure, and others. We haven't faced any config issues. Everything has been great.

It streamlined the batch environments. It got everybody on the same page, and people haven't had to monitor their own jobs. We've been able to centralize the running of batch environments. We've been able to migrate various schedulers into one central location. It has helped with reducing risk by being aware of what's running and making sure that what needed to run did run versus something breaking somewhere and nobody knowing about it. Here, if something breaks, everybody would know about it, and then action would be taken. It has reduced risk and streamlined and centralized operations.

It's very versatile. We generally have SQL jobs. We've SQL, SSIS, PowerShell, C#.NET, etc. So, whatever a program is written in, and whether it runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, or mainframe, there are just a wide variety of jobs it runs in different programming languages.

I've been an administrator for other schedulers over many years, which includes CA, AutoSys, Control-M, etc. Of all of them, Tidal is the easiest one to use. It's very GUI oriented, whereas a lot of the other schedulers have been command-line-based. It's by far the easiest scheduler to use for creating objects, which would be jobs, events, and things like that. It's all graphical. It's Windows-based. When building a job, most features are predefined. You just have to select where the executable is to run from and the time or event-based settings. You don't have to use the command line. Everything is kind of predefined for you. So, you just go through Windows and fill out different features in different jobs. It's simple. I've trained a lot of people on how to use it, and people who use Tidal for the first time are able to make jobs, whereas, with other schedulers, there are other things that they need to know, such as operating system-level commands. With Tidal, almost everything is already defined. You just tell it where to run the job from, which folder it's in, what's the name of the executable, and then the time when you want it to run. It can be learned within an hour. It's pretty cool.

I've used Tidal Automation to connect and integrate with a lot of different software and systems. I've used PeopleSoft, Informatica, BI, SQL Databases, VMware, Azure, and others. I haven't had any issues. So far, everything has been great. They have a compatibility matrix that ensures that different versions of Tidal will work with different software. They're good about keeping that up to date. Occasionally, you have to apply hotfixes to different software levels, but I've had good luck with the interfaces.

It is easy to integrate other technologies and processes via the REST API. All you need is access and a log-in ability, and it integrates well. You don't really need to do a lot of configuration.

It has increased capacity by manyfold in terms of the number of jobs and/or integrations. I've gone from 500 jobs to 1,500 in just six months. That's really in the first year of setting up Tidal. It worked that way at other companies too, with the same kind of jump.

The biggest improvement, and the reason that it was brought into the organization, is the creation of a cohesive set of job streams across multiple applications. An example would be if you order a coat on our website. That order goes through our e-com system. Eventually, it gets picked up by Tidal, handed off to our SAP financial system and order fulfillment system, and is then sent over to the warehouse management environment. Those applications enable us to collect the money and to know what we need to replenish. We also use them to get the coat ordered and sent to the person who ordered it. All of that is handled by different applications across our enterprise and Tidal gives us the way to schedule those in a single job stream that can be managed with dependencies and tracked.

Tidal has helped increase capacity, in terms of the number of jobs, but a lot of that has followed the increase in virtual machine and database capacity. We've gone from about 2,000 jobs a day to around 11,000 jobs a day. Tidal has been easily able to keep up with that capacity.

We are using it for cross-platform workloads. That is probably the biggest reason that we are using it. The solution is generally good. Over the years, we have needed to do our own learning about how to manage it in terms of understanding dependencies and successors, then setting up times and so forth. However, this is the type of stuff you would have to learn with any scheduling app. We find it to be really useful. I'm hoping with the Explorer tool that they'll have better reporting so we can do some full cross-platform job stream reporting that they haven't really done much in the past. Therefore, we should be able to see some of that. In terms of managing it, I find it very useful other than the learning curve.

We use cross-platform management for so many things. We use it a lot for our warehouse management replenishment type things: to and from SAP. Once we implemented our job stream flow, things gets sorted out of house for delivery and can be update in SAP (and vice versa). Having the job stream has been helpful. Also, having it all automated makes a difference to replenishment. 

We use the ability to enable admins and users to see the information relevant to them specifically in our production environment. We can, but don't always, limit someone to only seeing data that they need to see. Then, they are not overwhelmed by other data. We do allow most of our users to see all the other data just for information and to understand the environment. However, you can begin to narrow in on what you need, if you're using policies and work groups correctly. Depending on how we use it, especially in production, it lets users only be able to do what they should be doing in production. They should only be managing their jobs, possibly see other jobs, and understand if there is a delay upstream which could be impacting them. They won't be able to manage those jobs. They need to contact the right people who understand those jobs to manage them. The solution lets them work within their lanes and do the work correctly without having a negative impact upstream, and hopefully, not downstream. 

There is an awareness that we are scheduling across the multiple applications and understanding that all applications don't live in their own silos. There is an impact across the organization. It gives us that holistic awareness, in general.

In the past couple of years, I have done education and we have leveraged creating alerts that go to the right people. It has allowed us to do that. Therefore, I don't get alerts for something that I shouldn't be dealing with. Now, people who own the jobs get the alerts and they can figure out if there is a problem with the application that they need to work with or if it is something with Tidal. Then, if necessary, they can elevate it up to me. Fortunately, that doesn't happen as much anymore, which makes me very happy. It gives us the alerts in time so we can handle things ideally before they become critical, and hopefully, we're doing our jobs so the right people are contacted.

It has simplified the complex workload by automating a huge number of tasks. We can configure and design even without coding knowledge. 

Tidal is a platform-independent software, which can be accessed in any browser. 

Error handling feature is amazing in Tidal, this improves business efficiency. A user-friendly interface makes users learn and navigate different modules quickly and effortlessly. 

Tidal is a valuable asset to our organization and will highly recommend it for implementation in businesses.

Tidal Workload Automation Software helped my organization to reduce operational costs by streamlining processes, eliminating errors, and minimizing the need for manual intervention. Additionally, automating tasks reduces the need for hiring additional personnel, which can result in significant cost savings.

Tidal Workload Automation Software provides the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements.

The software helps organizations to easily modify workflows to accommodate changes in business processes, and it can dynamically allocate resources based on changing workloads.

The solution has improved our organization with:

1. Increased productivity. By automating tasks, we were able to focus on more valuable work, leading to increased productivity and efficiency.
2. Improved accuracy. Automating tasks has reduced the risk of human error, leading to more accurate results.
3. Enhanced compliance. Tidal Automation has helped us maintain compliance with regulations and standards by automating tasks such as audit trails and security checks.
4. Greater visibility. Tidal Automation provided a central dashboard for monitoring and managing tasks, providing greater visibility into an organization's operations.
5. Scalability. As our organization started growing, Tidal Automation was scaled to meet the increased workload and complexity of tasks.

It reduces our administrative costs. As much as people are in a DevOps model, we can create dashboards for tier-one people to monitor multiple jobs and then alert or call when things fail. It helps us with reliability and managing SLAs.

It has also helped to reduce weekend and overtime hours due to the fact that you can have a single person manage multiple jobs. If we didn't have the single pane of glass and that visibility, people would have to manually look at logs to determine the progress of a job. So it reduces headcount. But when you run 24 by seven and 365 you still have people working weekends.

We run 70,000 Tidal jobs a day. it would take a mountain of people months to run that many jobs manually.

By automating tasks and facilitating the quick implementation of new processes, Tidal Automation is assisting our organization in adapting to changing market conditions, customer requirements, and other factors.

By lowering the possibility of errors and the costs that go along with them, this product can produce outcomes that are more accurate and consistent.

It enables us to concentrate on tasks that are more valuable, like procedure improvements, innovation, and customer service. As a result, workers may be more productive because they can accomplish greater tasks in quicker amounts of time.

It helps us make efficient and maximal use of our servers, from four in the morning until eight in the evening, with the maximum number of jobs executed automatically. We produce lenses for glasses in our factory and it's a 24/7 operation. The automation enables that, according to our requirements. Otherwise, we would need people to take action due to various dependencies, and it helps us avoid errors. 

The data needs to be uploaded to the database every time new data comes in. It could be a single line item or a thousand line item, data upload needs to be done manually and the DB job needs to run later we refresh reports and dashboards so that the new data gets populated. And all the necessary changes are made to the reports before they are published to services.

This is just a part of the daily routine and just this itself includes a lot of manual intervention. Tidal Automation has made it so simple by using time-driven and event-driven job scheduling and management. A significant amount of time and manual effort is now saved without compromising on the quality of the outcome.

Tidal Automation automates time-consuming and repetitive chores, decreasing employee workload and increase productivity. 

It can also reduce error risk, enhance data and process quality and precision, and provide real-time tracking and alerting. 

It is intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes. 

Tidal Automation also offers sophisticated security features and compliance controls to guarantee the security of confidential data and processes. 

It can assist companies in streamlining processes, improving efficiency, reducing errors, and saving money, making it a useful instrument for groups of all sizes.

Tidal Workload Automation Software helps organizations manage complex workflows, applications, and infrastructure in a more streamlined and effective manner.

Tidal Software also provides audit tracking and compliance reporting, allowing organizations to track job execution, changes, and approvals. Overall, it improves the compliance and governance of the organization.

The software can automate business processes such as financial reporting, order processing, and supply chain management which improves efficiency and increases productivity.

Tidal Automation offers extensive monitoring and reporting features that let users keep track of the status of their workflows and quickly spot any problems. 

The tool's high degree of adaptability also enables users to design processes that are tailored to their particular company requirements.

The Tidal software utility offers a wide variety of automation features, including exception handling, sophisticated dependency management, and event-based scheduling. Helped our organization to meet SLAs.

One of the main benefits of Tidal Automation is increased efficiency and productivity in tidal energy production. By automating the process of turbine management and optimization, Tidal Automation can help reduce downtime, improve turbine performance, and ultimately increase energy output. This can lead to cost savings and improved profitability for organizations in the tidal energy industry.

Tidal Automation can help improve the reliability and safety of tidal energy systems. By analyzing real-time data and making adjustments to turbine settings, Tidal Automation can identify potential issues and prevent equipment failures before they occur. This can help minimize the risk of accidents or other safety incidents.

For administrators, the alerting has been a big plus, in addition to having a place to go and look at the status. They can be notified when there's something happening in a schedule, like things are falling behind schedule, or something unexpectedly fails. It definitely helps speed up the time to jump in and address an issue and get things back on track.

It has also given us a framework for standardizing a lot of our processes. Before we had all these things in Tidal, there were so many custom services and applications written. Tidal has given us a way to say, "Here's a standard way for you to get your jobs scheduled and automated." It hasn't necessarily enforced it, but it has given people an opportunity to say, "Oh, if I use the tool and if I set up my jobs to be able to run in the scheduler, it will be that much easier for me to get this delivered to production, or to test it and validate it." It has helped us put a framework around how developers are going to get their application code deployed. It's not really pushing the code, but it has encouraged some consistency in how they design their processes.

It would be really hard to quantify how much staff time it has saved, but for sure, before that initial move into the solution, some things would take forever. It was just complete spaghetti going through dozens of boxes with different crontabs trying to figure out: "Okay, I had an incident in the middle of the night. What ran, what didn't run? What ran but didn't complete successfully?" and those kinds of things. Tidal has resulted in a huge gain there. I don't think there's any way I could quantify how much it's simplified those outage scenarios. 

And even a planned maintenance was just as hard as an outage before we had Tidal. Now, with a scheduler, we can schedule a big maintenance that's going to require a lot of people to be on hand, one where time is of the essence. The more efficiently we can adjust a schedule for an off-hours maintenance and essentially disrupt what our typical schedule is, the more it helps us with those maintenance procedures. We know in advance that we have the capability to move jobs earlier and to move jobs later so that they're outside of the maintenance window and that we're not going to conflict with anything. When we're done with our maintenance, we're able to just press a button and let everything run and go.

Tidal has definitely reduced weekend and overtime hours. In our environment, there's no way to eliminate those hours, but that's nothing to do with Tidal. That's our own design. 

Our team does the majority of the work with the scheduler. It gives us the ability to do a lot of the scheduling tasks pretty quickly, so that the developers or business folks who are making requests don't need to deal with it. It gives us the leverage to make what they feel is a bigger change to the schedule, and to knock it out really quickly. They don't have to code something or make changes to handle it. We can do a lot of those adjustments from the scheduler itself.

The solution has enabled us to do more in terms of job capacity because, in the past, we had all these different crontabs running around out there. There was really no good way for people to condense jobs together, as soon as the previous one finished, unless they customized every process flow or job flow into a script. Doing so was essentially a custom program or process that they'd have to create for each one, and that's pretty difficult to manage. With the scheduler, we can squeeze those jobs together with their native process runtimes and say, "Okay, we're going to run through steps 1 to 10, allow those things to run in a sequence, and get them done in the shortest window possible. It has definitely helped with that.

Our environment is really different now compared to what it was when we started with Tidal all those years ago, but there's really no way we could have sustained that old model without having the functionality that's in the scheduler get our schedule done quickly. As our company has grown, it's been difficult for us to find maintenance windows or quiet periods. Every minute that we can save reduces the time an overnight batch process impacts daytime business users. The quicker we can get things completed, the better it is for the user experience and our environment.

The solution’s drill-down functionality is really good. It can be limited to just seeing a specific job or a group of jobs, depending upon the person's location.

We utilize Tidal for updating other computer systems used within the plants with JD Edwards transactions. This functionality alone saves a lot of time so personnel didn't have to manually run jobs to update the other systems. 

It saves times due to automation. With some files, we do hundreds a day for a particular vendor. This would be hard to do manually. Also, the speed at which we can do this is excellent. We do all types of stuff, like we print checks for customers at the local office, which used to take a bunch of time, but now, we can do it in a minute or two.

Windows and Linux are our servers. We use it there, then we do things between Workday or the business application for Oracle. We can do processes which include local scripts or work with these different tools, then they can blend them altogether with Tidal. It does a very good job of managing cross-platform, cross-application workloads. It lets our command center monitor a bunch of things from one screen.

The solution enables admins and users to see information relevant to them. We do a lot of this as we have different teams who want to monitor their own jobs or be involved with their own support. They can do that. With the different levels of security within the tool, we can allow people to rerun jobs or just view information and different things based on their need and security requirements. This helps us decentralize a lot activity. If users can look at things themselves, or potentially certain groups can rerun jobs, we can offload that from the command center or other support teams.

We need to have less Tidal specific support people and more generalists, as they know their own applications in more depth than any of us. It lets them more effectively do their support, and not need to have other people do support, like in the command center or Tidal team. The solution has increased productivity by getting people's problems resolved faster. It also helps those teams understand how things work a little better, so maybe they can improve their processes.

If we can get the problem solving closest to the people who know the resources, we don't have to bring in the Tidal team since a lot of this stuff is not an actual Tidal problem. It's more a problem with their script or server, etc. Therefore, they can get work on their specific issue themselves. For example, we can't fix their script or if there's a problem with their server. That's not our team's function. They can get to that faster. Or, the people who are monitoring, like the command center, can help get their ticket to the right group faster.

Until recently, I had to be available on call. Now, that has greatly dropped. We have these different groups who take more responsibility for themselves. Before, if anything went wrong, they called Tidal, who would say, "Your script is not our problem." Now, they're able to route those tickets more effectively, and those of us who are on the Tidal team don't have a standard on call anymore.

Tidal Automation is a better tool than Redwood for enterprise-level applications. It is a stable tool and easier to integrate with any product.

We have a lot of custom-made applications within and outside our company. The product helps us connect with all of the applications in a better way than Redwood. It has in-built plugins enabling easy synchronization.

Tidal Automation actually helps a lot to improve overall SLA breaching (in percentage). We can easily maintain the incidents in SLA as it was triggering alerts. It allowed us to see the priorities so that the team could easily work on those alerts in a timely fashion. 

Also, server data visualization is much easier and helps to identify the capability and extended the resources to help scale up the project accordingly. This scaling was possible thanks to the Tidal Automation tool. 

It makes work easy and fast. There is no need to add more engineers to each shift. In the end, fewer resources could handle things with Tidal.

It has improved our organization in the following ways:

1. We have intricate workflows and business processes using Tidal Automation software, which has increased output, accuracy, and efficiency.

2. Tidal automation software has greater visibility and control over its business processes.

3. Tidal Automation software provides real-time monitoring and alerts, allowing organizations to respond quickly to issues and ensure that workflows are running smoothly.

4. Tidal Automation software can help reduce errors and ensure that tasks are completed with a high degree of accuracy.

The product helps our company in the way that we've engineered it using bespoke jobs that we've written in a clever way. There's nothing directly at the moment. That might change as we move into the cloud, depending on which cloud we go with or on the adapters that they use, e.g., if they have native S3 adapters or events that can fire Lambda functions, which are a bit more interesting to us.

With the portfolio of jobs that we're talking about, it's continuing to grow. There is way more work being added to the system than there is work that is being retired from it. That's just the way the animal works. It's been able to handle, perfectly fine, the complexity of the interrelationships between the processes.

We actually ported off of Maestro. Maestro was the scheduler that we were using, enterprise-wide, and it was very inefficiently used when I got here. When we came up on Tidal, we didn't convert anything. We built all of the definitions that exist in Tidal. So over the 15 years, that portfolio has grown.

As a whole, we're trying to automate as many things as we can to alleviate the manual processes. One of the things that Tidal has helped us with, because it is cross-platform: We had a number of different schedulers in this organization and we've been porting everything that was running out of these other, unrelated schedulers into this scheduler. That has afforded us the ability to set up direct dependencies between processes that couldn't talk to one another before. Over the 15 years, we've definitely gained a lot from that. What had been manual controls have become automated controls, by using this tool to replace a number of schedulers.

Tidal enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them. We have something like 50 different teams working on our Tidal platform. We segregate between them using work groups. When a user logs into Tidal, they only see what they have permission for, not other projects. Data engineers are the users of this solution.

A user who comes into Tidal, develops his job, and creates their job in Tidal, then triggers the job or sets up a schedule. An admin is someone who keeps the lights on, making sure the platform is up and running. They maintain the solution and configure it, doing upgrades.

If I just want to monitor my job, that is something that the solution does really well because there is some constant job activity that you can login and see what has happened every day and every minute. That is pretty good. An admin can drill down to processes and data, but I don't think they are doing that.

The solution has helped to eliminate weekend hours. In the past, we had to schedule a job every Saturday. Then, someone had to login and run the job. Now, Tidal has the capability of event-driven jobs. For example, if a job is failing, we can do something. Or, if a job is completed abnormally, we can rerun the job. So, all of these features that they offer help us not to come into the office on a Saturday. We don't need to have a human person do those weekend activities and treat them. They also thought a lot of about outages in the product. You can set up an outage to an adapter or connection, to say, "Between these hours on the weekend, I don't want to trigger any jobs." That works very well.

We use Tidal to connect to other resources and systems through many of its adapters, such as for S3, ServiceNow, and PeopleSoft. We use it to trigger jobs in those applications. The REST API is very easy. Our application users use it to create, rerun, or cancel their jobs. And if they want to update something in the database, they do it with the REST API. It's a good feature.

That direct integration to our applications means we don't need to do other integrations from other applications or create scripts for these integrations. The multiple adapters available for connecting to other software make it easy for users to use the solution.

When I started here, they had already been on Tidal for about five years. So I'm not really sure where they were before Tidal. They did a lot of mainframe things in the past. From what I've heard from people here from the "old school," once they globalized and got everything into Tidal, the ability to see everything across the scheduling universe was a huge improvement. They didn't have to give different people different access to different systems and check four or five things, just to make sure something was running correctly.

The solution helped to reduce weekend and overtime hours. We're a 24 by 7 support model. Regarding the Tidal application, the one thing that we try to explain to anybody, from a support or monitoring standpoint, is that jobs trigger through Tidal, but not physically in Tidal. So if we have, hypothetically, an SAP job failure, it's not a Tidal failure, it's an SAP failure. So it goes right to SAP support, which saves time. In the environment I came from, they didn't have that mentality. So if, hypothetically, an ERP job failed, they'd call the Tidal person first instead of the ERP support. That type of understanding, as a whole, really helps from a support standpoint. The admins don't get a lot of calls unless there's an actual issue with the Tidal application itself.

In the time I've been here, we've definitely increased staff availability. From a business standpoint, we've started utilizing file monitors more, for what they call "file events" within the application. In the past, when an end-user would drop a file in SAP, for example, they'd contact our operations team, or send an email saying, "Run in this job." There isn't a real need for that in many cases. We've implemented a lot of file events that will actually only run jobs if they need to, if a file's available. Along the same lines, we had processes that would run a process in SAP, and even though it didn't create a file, there were other jobs downstream that would be hanging out and waiting for a file that never showed up. So not from just a staff availability point of view, but in terms of resource availability, it has definitely improved things a lot. From an operator standpoint, I would estimate Tidal is saving us 15 to 20 hours per week, just in manual interaction with inserting jobs on a request, since a lot of that stuff was implemented at our end.

Regarding job counts, we're pushing over seven million a year. That varies, obviously, depending on request jobs and other things. There are some processes that we shut down for year-end processing, so they stop running for a week or two. But from an expansion standpoint, we are constantly looking to see where else we can use Tidal, for new applications that are coming online or things that people are running on their own where they haven't even thought about Tidal's scheduling. In 2019, we did 7.7 million jobs. In 2018, we were at 7.1 million. In 2017, we were at 6.1 million. So with Tidal we're adding on the order of half-a-million jobs per year.

As far as investigating what ran and when, it is fine for the most part. You can investigate on the GUI and take a look at different things. 

We've been using it for 15 years so we clearly like the product. We wouldn't be able to do many of the complex scheduling that we do today without it. For us, it is a mission-critical app. Because if it doesn't work or has a problem, then SAP doesn't function. It is that critical. So, it's an essential tool for us to manage and run SAP jobs. We depend on Tidal. Without it, we wouldn't be able to function. 

A lot of stuff is automated. You don't need people running things on their own. They can schedule and run it, then not having to worry about it. They can even get alerts if there is a problem. People are just coming into the mix only if there is a problem. They get alerted to see what happened. From the automated aspect of it, you can run jobs based on a schedule, events, or whatever reduces manual intervention.

It just makes our life that much easier because all we have to do is define complex jobs, then they are pretty much on their own. We only intervene if there is a problem. Otherwise, people don't even know it is there unless there is a problem.

We run a very large number of jobs per day. At the end of month, in particular, we can easily build jobs and dependencies, expanding on what we do. It's not so much a factor of what Tidal can do, it's more a factor of what SAP can do. You can easily expand what you do with Tidal, but then you need to be sure that you can do it right in SAP. E.g., what happens after we started seeing SAP to do it? From a Tidal perspective, it is pretty easy now because we have had it for so long and have so much experience with it. It has helped quite a bit in terms of increasing capacity.

We are constantly adding jobs, though not a ton. Sometimes, we take some away, but that's rare. It's more that we add jobs. It simplifies the process of developing an application if I have Tidal because I can around things and automate things easily with Tidal. The solution is very important to us because it does a lot for us 24/7/365.

It helps because we have brought in a lot of other applications and systems where we're able to use an enterprise-level scheduler that is consistently monitored and backed up and has a ton of redundancy so that we don't have any downtime. We're pretty close to 99 percent uptime on our scheduler.

It has reduced some of our weekend and overtime hours. For us, it's all based on the programming around the scheduler. For some teams, it has greatly reduced weekend and night hours, but for some people it hasn't because they babysit the process.

Tidal has also helped us increase capacity in terms of the number of jobs. Over the last three years we've added between 10,000 and 15,000 jobs.

Using this solution has improved the way our organization functions because support is available whenever we have problems.