SAPinsider Issue 3 2020

exactly what went wrong with the job. Then I can contact the person that manages that specific func- tion, have them fix it, and then restart the job. But if nothing is wrong with the job, it is completely out of my hands, and I don’t need to be bothered. I get brought in only if I am needed, which is great and frees up a lot of time.” Coordinating Processes Across Multiple SAP Systems from a Central Location Another major timesaving benefit that Riddell experienced with RunMyJobs was drastically reduc- ing the time it took to perform previously long-run- ning jobs. For example, the production planning functionality of SAP ERP deals with production processes such as material requirements planning (MRP), and Riddell historically had a long-running MRP job that would detail what each of the manu- facturing plants needed to run for the day. Buckner describes this job as a chain that has multiple steps in it, where each step runs a program with a differ- ent set of parameters to operate. “The MRP job that we pulled from SAP ERP had 31 steps in it, and each step ran one program,” he says. “With SAP ERP’s built-in scheduling package, each job can only run one program at a time, one after the other. There is no ability to run jobs at the same time and coordi- nate them to talk to each other.” At that time, Riddell had plants outside the US, which complicated the planning process due to time-zone differences. To help address this, the 31 steps were orchestrated so that the plants that opened first were earlier in the sequence. However, another complication was that once the MRP pro- cess finished, a business intelligence (BI) process needed to start to send that information to the data warehouse. Originally, this was handled by estimating how long the MRP job would take (usu- ally about 10 hours) and scheduling the BI process to start at a specific time after that. But if the MRP process took longer than 10 hours, the jobs would overlap and create a waterfall of extra work. For instance, if the MRP process ran long, the manu- facturing plants might start their day with incom- plete information, and the BI people would have to expend a lot of time and effort cleaning it up. RunMyJobs acts as a bridge between systems that do not talk to each other — for Riddell, these were SAP ERP and the datawarehouse—and brings them together to coordinate jobs between the systems. In Riddell works directly with SAP to continue to meet high demands in its North Ridgeville, Ohio, manufacturing, reconditioning, and distribution facility. 10 SAPinsiderOnline.com