Year in and year out, the Robot products earn their keep

Rugged climbs up soaring mountains. Peaceful hikes through quiet woods. Gliding gently over lakes and rivers. If your plans include the outdoors, REI has everything you’ll need to make your adventure a success. And, when REI wanted to make sure their computer operations could keep up with their business responsibilities, they turned to Help/Systems and the Robot products.

REI (Recreational Equipment Incorporated) was founded as a cooperative in 1938 to sell outdoor gear and clothing to members. Members pay $15.00 for a lifetime membership and receive a dividend each year on their purchases.

Today, REI operates more than 80 stores throughout the U.S., and has a thriving online and direct sales business. “We’ve been around a long time, and we have a lot of satisfied customers and members,” says Rod Williams, IS Manager for Service Assurance, at REI headquarters in Kent, Washington, a suburb of Seattle.

REI began using the IBM AS/400 as its business computer in the late 1980s, when it was first introduced. Since then, they’ve acquired several more iSeries and System i systems. Most are located at the Kent location.

One System i is located at REI’s distribution center, a few miles away in Sumner. The company first began using the Robot products when they purchased this system for the distribution center.

Automation journey began with a job scheduler
“We were opening the new distribution center in about 1990 and needed to purchase a scheduler to run a set of batch jobs. We looked at a couple of different products and chose the Help/Systems products,” says Rod. “Prior to that time, we were primarily a mainframe shop. This was our first foray into automation products for the System i.”

Today, the company uses Robot/CONSOLE for message management, Robot/SCHEDULE for job scheduling, and Robot/SAVE, for backup and recovery.

Says Rod, “We found these products very easy to install and set up. Especially in the case of the distribution center. We were able to do the things we wanted to straightforwardly and simply with the Robot/SCHEDULE package. Fifteen years later, the applications have changed, but we still have a lights-out data center and we rely on Help/Systems products to maintain that.

Another big payback came from Robot/CONSOLE
“The other big savings came when we put Robot/CONSOLE in our Kent data center, which is staffed 24 hours a day. We really didn’t have a message management system, so operators were constantly having to answer inquiry messages. Robot/CONSOLE allowed us to manage that. Our operators were doing things that the software does better and it frees them to do other things.”

REI automated their message processing by creating message sets. For example, they created device failure messages that break to the operator and let them know when there’s a problem. Says Rod, “We had a problem with a credit authorization that was going to another company. As part of troubleshooting that problem, we created some message sets to monitor for those messages, and now we’re alerted (to problems) much sooner.”

Other messages are suppressed so operators never have to see them. Adds Rod, “We’ve written some in-house programs for different applications so that they create a unique message and we monitor for that message ID. Then, we give the operator specific instructions on what to do, or just automate a recovery action.”

Flexible implementation for each system
REI runs the same message sets on different systems whenever it’s appropriate to do so. Other message sets are unique to each system based on the applications they run.

As Rod explains, “We have nine operators staffing the data center 24/7. Not all came to REI with extensive System i experience. But no matter their level of experience, they can monitor messages through Robot/CONSOLE. The night operators are monitoring the batch schedule, looking for errors, and watching the timeliness of the schedule to meet our service level agreements with REI customers.”

The future ties into enterprise monitoring
Currently, REI’s systems are independent of each other, but each system has Robot/CONSOLE installed. Adds Rod, “The next step in monitoring and message management is to integrate Robot/CONSOLE messages and automation into enterprise monitoring systems. Our aim is to monitor for the availability of business services, the way the customer sees them, not the way IT sees them.

“We haven’t had the resources to really fully explore these products. There’s a lot of other things we could be doing if we had more resources.”

Rod sums it up, “It’s never been a goal to eliminate staff through automation. Instead, it’s the challenge of absorbing the work and responsibility that results from business growth. It would just be a lot more difficult, and I probably wouldn’t sleep as well.

“These products have helped us achieve our business goals, beginning in 1991 with a new data center in a new REI distribution center. They continue to be an important part of our business strategy and achievement of goals.”

by Kiki Koras, Technical Writer

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 9:29 am and is filed under Robot/CONSOLE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.