Success Story K + S
Centralized job scheduling and lower maintenance costs after migration from IBM‘s TWS to BatchMan
Objective: Optimization of process workflows after migration
K+S is one of the world’s foremost suppliers of special and standard fertilizers, plant care and salt products. The consolidated subsidiary, K+S IT-Services GmbH, in Kassel, Germany operates the applications centrally for about 40 European sites in an SAP environment with 12 live systems. Since 2005, K+S IT-Services GmbH has been working in a FlexFrame landscape, where servers from FSC (Fujitsu Siemens Computers) with Intel basis are used. FlexFrame was introduced in order to make managing the required IT infrastructure easier, to use resources more effectively and to be able to react to new business requirements more quickly. In the course of the switch, the job scheduling for the applications was transferred from the computer center / production into the application development.
Industry: Fertilizers and salts
Use Case: Migration from Tivoli Workload Scheduler
Advantages: Full integration with SAP and lower maintenance costs
- Simple handling
- Considerably lower maintenance costs
- No additional hardware required
- Can also be used on development and test systems, integration into the ITIL Change Management
- License costs only arise for live systems, not for development and test systems
- Better graphics for network representations
- Smooth transition to the FlexFrame landscape
- Only minimal amount of training needed
Evaluation
Before introducing BatchMan, TWS (Tivoli Workload Scheduler) from IBM on the hardware platform RS6000 in AIX had been used for years at K+S IT-Services GmbH. By switching the system landscape on the basis of FSC Intel and the SLES9 (Linux) operating system an upgrade to a more recent version of the scheduler was required. At about the same time, the previous maintenance contract expired and more costs were expected due to changes in the licensing model. Therefore, K+S ITServices GmbH decided to look for an alternative.
Since the employees in the application development area were to take on a large part of the responsibilities and they were already familiar with SAP, the new job scheduling system preference was obvious: finding a solution that fully integrated in SAP.
The Decision for BatchMan
After the evaluation phase, K+S IT-Services GmbH decided to introduce BatchMan as the new scheduler. The main reason for this decision was the complete integration of the scheduler into the SAP System.
Installation and Result
First, BatchMan was tested in December 2004 on a development system. During this phase, the concepts were mainly developed for job scheduling, for calendars, alerts, checkpoints, resources, RFC connections etc. In June 2005, BatchMan was installed on the first live system. This was carried out before the actual switch from AIX to Linux. Concurrent with the transfer of the SAP systems to FlexFrame, BatchMan was installed step by step on all other SAP systems. At the same time, the future BatchMan users were trained. The switch of all SAP systems was completed in July 2006.
The last step was the transfer of all non-SAP jobs on BatchMan into the SAP Solution Manager System. In October 2006, the TWS computers were switched off. Now the job control runs centrally in BatchMan for all SAP and non-SAP systems via the Solution Manager system. During the switch, only two days were needed for on-site support. The rest of the collaboration took place via phone calls and e-mails directly with the technical BatchMan Support.
