Success Story GRZ

GRZ controls its entire customer Business with BatchMan across systems

Initial Situation

The GRZ has been a satisfied BatchMan customer for almost 20 years. At that time, the decision was made for BatchMan, because GRZ knew the job control of the IBM mainframe and needed similar comfort for the job control in the former SAP R / 3. This was and still is not feasible with SAP on-board resources. BatchMan enables centralized planning and monitoring of cross-system processes, reducing manual intervention and errors to a minimum.

At the beginning, BatchMan was used for a single publisher in one central SAP system, in particular for the automation of batch processes in the GRZ-developed SAP-based publishing solution VI&VA®.

Over the years, GRZ has taken over the management of VI&VA® systems from various regional newspaper publishers through consolidation projects, which have also gradually been linked to the central control system via BatchMan. From a technical point of view, there will be 13 SAP clients with hundreds of company codes in which BatchMan 5 will automate the jobs for VI&VA® and standard SAP modules (FI and CO) in 2018.

Industry: Information Technology

Use Case: Migration to BatchMan 5, connection of 13 SAP clients

Advantages: New publishers can be connected without increasing staffing levels

Challenges for BatchMan

Upgrade of the existing eleven SAP clients to BatchMan 5
Reinstallation on central control system
Ensuring the secure batch operation of the VaaS customer systems during the entire migration phase

Project Challenge

As part of a new SaaS business model („VI&VA® as a Service“, VaaS) of the GRZ, the challenge was to establish batch operation for additional customers who chose VI&VA as a Service. The project involved the DuMont Mediengruppe and its publishers in Halle, Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg, which are being successively migrated to the GRZ VaaS solution. To do so, BatchMan should be relocated to a centralized control system having access to the otherwise completely network-separated landscapes of VaaS customers. At the same time, the old BatchMan landscape was migrated to Version 5 and integrated into the new control system in which the DuMont Media Group was already working.

„With the upgrade and the migration tools for version 5, BatchMan has again proven to be the robust and solid software that we have known and appreciated for many years.“

Dr. Bernhard Baehr, Systems Analyst in the department „VI&VA as a Service“, GRZ

Project Implementation

In close cooperation with HONICO, a practicable project process was developed. In doing so, the secondary requirement to start batch-operations for the new VaaS customers in the new BatchMan environment before the old environment can be migrated to the new centralized system has been well resolved. All technical upgrade and migration steps went smoothly. After the release change to the current BatchMan version 5 took place in the old GRZ-internal BatchMan system easily, the last project step was the relocation of the batch control for the „old clients“ to the new central BatchMan master system in the beginning of 2018.

GRZ's opinion

„BatchMan has been the trusted batch control tool in our publishers‘ VI&VA and SAP® system
environments for many years, helping us to run our VI&VA as a Service cloud solution efficiently.“

Clemens Wahlfeldt, Managing Director of GRZ

Benefits BatchMan Workload Automation

Central control of entire SAP/nonSAP systemlandscapes
Graphical modeling and central, clear monitoring of the process chains
Simple handling in operation to the end customer business (for example, customer groups, maintenance windows, alarms, etc.)
Easy adaptation of individual module solutions (e.g. SaaS)
Simple, fast upgrade and migration

Result and Outlook

In the new BatchMan environment, GRZ can now handle job scheduling for significantly more publishers without substantially increasing staffing levels. With BatchMan, GRZ system operation saves 50 percent time compared to job scheduling with SAP on-board resources. Above all, it is the transparency of the job processes through the graphical mode of the networks and the other features that make the work much easier.

About Gutenberg Rechenzentrum

Gutenberg Rechenzentrum GmbH & Co. KG (GRZ) is one of the leading IT service providers for the media industry. The GRZ has more than 40 years of experience in the digitalization of business processes in and between media companies. On the basis of modern technologies, GRZ‘s customers are supported in the implementation of new ideas or requirements and the optimization of existing processes. With more than 110 qualified employees, GRZ covers the entire range of IT services required in the media environment.