Automation Improves Quality Of Work Life

FOR OVER 40 YEARS, Tree of Life (a KeHE Company) has provided retailers throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and now Canada, with the products, services and the marketing edge that adds to their bottom line. As the nation’s leading distributor of natural, organic, specialty, ethnic, and gourmet food products, Tree of Life has helped thousands of retailers—from the smallest independent stores to the largest supermarket chains—meet the constantly growing demand for products that help Americans to “live well.”

At the data center in St. Augustine, Florida, John Kinnaird, National Operating Center Manager, is responsible for supporting both hardware and software for their IBM® System i.™ John notes that there’s been a great deal of change in how IT is set up and run at Tree of Life since he was hired. “When I started working for Tree of Life, everything was decentralized. Each of our distribution centers
had its own data center, ran their own AS/400,® and ran their own copy of the software.

“Shortly afterwards, we started the Regional Operating Centers project and consolidated all of the processing into two regional centers, St. Augustine and Dallas. Now, we have consolidated our processing onto a partitioned System i Model 570 in St. Augustine, where we run all of the warehousing, distribution, and financial applications for 12 distribution centers. The System i also hosts a production partition for our Canadian operations as well as a data warehouse partition and a development partition.

“Our core system is a warehousing and distribution system called NTS, the National Tree System, that was written in-house. We have several other applications such as JD Edwards World for financials and E3 for purchasing.”

Getting Started With Operations Automation

According to John, when he started with Tree of Life, the company already had the Robot products. The products were installed at each division location on the local AS/400 system. When the divisions were decentralized, some facilities were using the Robot products and some were not. Among the divisions that were using the products, there were various degrees of success. As Tree of Life began to consolidate the processing to one centralized system at their headquarters in St. Augustine, the company soon realized that Robot/SCHEDULE® (job scheduling software), Robot/ALERT® (event notification software), Robot/NETWORK® (network management software), and Robot/REPORTS® (report management software) could help make the company a true 24/7 operation.

John works with Jennifer Weatherly, Operation Analyst, who talks about centralizing Robot/SCHEDULE jobs. “We had several different jobs set up on different partitions. We wanted to convert all the jobs from all the partitions to a master system on the Robot/NETWORK Host. We put the jobs in one location and send them to the appropriate partition. Help/Systems Tech Support was instrumental in teaching us how to send existing jobs—including OPAL code, library lists, job environments, date objects, reserved command variables, and so on—from the Nodes (partitions) to the Host to create the master. We set up new Robot/
SCHEDULE jobs and changed the existing jobs in the product master, and then sent the jobs back to the Nodes. This setup helps us work efficiently with jobs that we maintain on a regular basis. Before, if we had a job on more than one partition, we had to change the job on each partition. Now, we change the job once and send it to the Node or Nodes. We have 12 divisions and they all run end-of-day, end-of-week, end-of-period, and end-of-month jobs. There is always a potential for a change or new process that a division needs. Our summary report shows more than 8,000 jobs that we run on a daily basis.

As John explains, “Robot/SCHEDULE has been a tremendous help. Originally, the end-of-day job streams were just one program call after another to a big CL program. There was no restart point and it was very inflexible. Robot/SCHEDULE is a huge improvement over our original processes. I don’t see how we could run our current production without Robot/SCHEDULE.”

The Next Step: Automating Report Management

Jennifer explains how she started using Robot/REPORTS. “Reports is another area where there’s been a big change in how we use the Robot products today. Tree of Life had Robot/REPORTS, but the company was not using the product when I started. So, I read the manual and started setting up reports. Whenever I ran into a roadblock, I’d pick up the phone and call Help/Systems Technical Support. I was pleasantly surprised to find someone always available. I didn’t waste valuable time on hold. Even after normal support hours, you usually get a call back in a half hour or less.

“In my experience, the techs are very knowledgeable. They answer my questions themselves or look up the solution in their database. Occasionally, they have to ask another tech, but they resolve issues very quickly. I am very pleased with the support.

I don’t see how we could run our current production withoutRobot/SCHEDULE.

“Because of the 12 divisions, we have a lot of reports. We are trying to print fewer reports. About 80% of our reports are available for online viewing, and we use Robot/ALERT to e-mail reports to users, customers, field sales support, and others.”

John adds, “We noticed a tremendous reduction in printed reports since we started using Robot/REPORTS. Not only are we saving paper, but people have better access to their reports now—especially the people out in the field. We had no way of getting printed reports to a lot of our salesmen. Now they can view the reports online. That’s a big benefit for us.”

Jennifer describes another project they are completing. “We send monthly reports to our customers. In the past, a group of employees came in on weekends, printed cover statements, and broke down a 700-page report, by customer, for mailing. Now we use Robot/SCHEDULE, Robot/ALERT, and Robot/REPORTS to accomplish the same task. We’re saving on printing, postage, and overtime, and our people get their weekends back.”

Learning More Through Online Training

John and Jennifer are also fans of Help/Systems online training classes. According to John, “Anytime we have a new operator, we have them take an online class. It gives them a good introduction to Robot/SCHEDULE. I think it’s well worth the money. They’re convenient, too. We are a 24/7 shop with a slim crew, so it is much easier to take an online class than to send someone somewhere for training and disrupt our entire work schedule.”

Jennifer adds, “I’ve taken online classes about upgrading the operating system and learning to manage partitions through the HMC (Hardware Management Console). It’s a good way to keep up on new hardware and software.”

Jennifer and John are proof that the Robot products help people live well in the data center, just as the Tree of Life products help people live well at home.