SAPinsider Issue 3 2020

Redwood’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, RunMyJobs . “With the on-premise version, we had to supply the hardware, maintain the database, and perform the backups and disaster recovery activi- ties. We owned all that,” says Buckner. “The attrac- tion of the cloud-based version was that all that maintenance went away. The new application talks to our systems in much the same way that the ear- lier one did, and it replaces those previous respon- sibilities that got in the way of the other work we had to do. By offloading the management and sup- port of hardware and licenses, we relieve a lot of hassles.” Moving to SaaS-Based Job Scheduling After previewing a demonstration from Redwood on the new solution’s capabilities, the IT depart- ment was convinced to invest in moving its work- load automation and job scheduling solution to the cloud. The migration itself from Cronacle to RunMyJobs was smooth and took under a month to complete, and problems were minor and addressed right away, according to Buckner. “An expert from Redwood came on-site to assist us with the migra- tion, ensure it was done correctly, show us how to use the product, and hold training classes, which were very helpful,” he says. “Because the project was not a brand-new implementation but rather a migration, it involved pulling out the configura- tion — that is, the parameters about what a job looks like, what its schedule looks like, and any other functionality in there — from the on-premise application and loading it into the new one. We decided to take a phased approach where we began running two or three secondary functions in paral- lel in the on-premise system and in the cloud. We watched those in RunMyJobs to ensure they were running properly before turning them off in Cro- nacle. And we kept that up until all of them were on RunMyJobs.” After successfully migrating and rolling all jobs completely onto RunMyJobs, Riddell learned about the new capabilities it could use to achieve addi- tional process improvements. Buckner was espe- cially taken with the mobility and accessibility of the new solution. “I no longer had to be in my envi- ronment to access the solution — I could be any- where and watch the system to see what was going on with it,” he says. “About a month after we went live with RunMyJobs, I was at a conference in the middle of a keynote speech, and I got an email that we had a job failure. I was able to immediately pull out my mobile device and investigate what went wrong with it.” This mobility and alerting functionality elimi- nates many hours of manual effort, especially for important jobs that previously would have required someone to be sitting at a desktop logged into the SAP system, keeping an eye on the progress and watching the job run. The benefit of the alerting function is that it eliminates potential time wast- ing. For example, say a job owner was in the habit of checking on a certain job’s status once every hour. If that individual checked at 9:00am but the job then failed at 9:05am, 55 minutes would have been lost — since the next manual check would not have occurred until 10:00am. “The alerting module in RunMyJobs watches all the jobs for us and tells us if something went wrong so we can fix the problem,” Buckner says. “It makes the job log accessible so I can see the errors themselves right there in the application and know Riddell, headquartered in Des Plaines, Illinois, is a leading manufacturer of football head protection and protective equipment at all levels of play. 9 SAPinsiderOnline.com