PHFA and Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise Work Together To Fill a Void

In 1972, the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency (PHFA) was created with the following mission: “To make the Commonwealth [of Pennsylvania] a better place to live while fostering community and economic development, the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency provides the capital for decent, safe, and affordable homes and apartments for older adults, persons of modest means, and those with special housing needs.”

Today, PHFA fills a void in the commercial markets and helps the state of Pennsylvania help people in danger of losing their home at little cost to taxpayers (including an Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program). To finance some of their operations, they sell bonds, using the revenue to buy, sell, and service mortgages. They often work closely with other government entities like Fannie Mae, Ginny Mae, and the Federal Reserve. They currently have financed more than 130,000 houses and 54,000 apartments, and have assisted 40,000 homeowners threatened with foreclosure in Pennsylvania.

Kevin Wike has been with PHFA for about 25 years. Today he manages a programming staff of IBM i and Microsoft .NET developers and a partitioned IBM i Power6 server. As he explains, “Our developers have multiple skill sets, so I have a lot of flexibility with my project assignments and the products we deliver. We’ve written approximately 80% of our software in-house because we need specialized, custom business applications. There are only fifty state agencies like us in the country [one per state], so it can be difficult to find what we need off the shelf.”

A Windows and IBM i World

PHFA has a diverse software and hardware environment. As Kevin explans, “We run our systems using a combination of a partitioned IBM Power6 server running IBM i and Windows servers. We have thousands of IBM i programs running interactive and batch processes that execute the day-to-day business of PHFA. We’ve also developed hundreds of Windows applications that run on Microsoft servers for niche processes. We have multiple Web sites—one for borrowers and three business-to-business sites: a Pennsylvania banking-partner site; a multi-family financing area site; and a site for our counseling agency partners.

“Our IBM i systems and our Microsoft servers are located in our data center in Harrisburg (the state capitol). We also have satellite operations near Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. We’ve been using Robot [Robot/SCHEDULE®] since our System/38 days. Even back then, we used Robot as our operator—we’ve never had a full-time operator.”

Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise Joins the Party

As Kevin describes it, “Around 2001, we started using our Microsoft environment as another platform for applications we’d developed in conjunction with the IBM i. We use one Microsoft server for our Windows “batch” server. We’ve written a lot of apps for that environment—we have about fifty different batch-type applications and monitor jobs running. Originally, we used the Microsoft Task Scheduler to control that environment. When we starting using more advanced scheduling, it wasn’t robust enough for our needs.

“Then, Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise hit the scene. As I said, we’ve used Robot/SCHEDULE for scheduling on the IBM i server. When we saw the capabilities of Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, we thought, ‘Let’s keep everything IBM i-centric.’ We use the IBM i server to support the Web sites, so we decided to make it our standard for scheduling. Now, we control all jobs, on all platforms, with Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise.”

Automated Cross-Platform Processing

They’ve actually integrated Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise into their applications. As Kevin describes, “We have a Windows application that performs a tax bill reminder service for our mortgagors. During tax season, it determines which borrowers haven’t sent us the property tax bills we need to pay their school taxes from their escrow accounts. The program builds a table of telephone numbers to call and tells Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise to schedule the transfer of the file to a third-party site at a dynamic, variable time. Once the site receives the file, they use the telephone number table to make auto-calls with a predetermined message. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise also schedules an IBM i job to retrieve the results of the call campaign from the Web site and update our database.

“All of the Web applications we created run on Microsoft Web servers. Because of the ‘hook’ to our IBM i DB partition, we can execute IBM i programs directly from the Web browser applications. We use this to have Web applications that adjust other job schedules in Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise using APIs. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise is very solid and runs flawlessly. Actually, I can’t ever remember having an operational problem with any of the Robot software.”

No More Auditor Concerns

As Kevin explains, another nice thing about robust automated scheduling becomes obvious when the auditors come calling. “It’s great because it’s self-documenting. With all the Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise reporting, job history is easy to track. We can really satisfy auditor demands. For example, I think the Good Morning Report is worth a million bucks. You come in, you look at it, and you can know what ran normally and what didn’t. The auditors like that.”

A Fast Smooth Conversion

Kevin was very impressed with how smoothly the conversion to Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise went and how easy it is to use. “When we started Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, we took everything from the Windows Task Scheduler and converted it in two days. We had to make some slight changes, but basically, in two days the new production environment was running. During that conversion, I referenced the User Guides, and if I didn’t understand something I’d call Tech Support. They’d explain how something worked and off I’d go. One thing I really like is how easy to use Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise is, I think it’s very intuitive. Everything is straightforward—you can figure out ninety-five percent of it yourself.”

Now, their automation is almost complete. “Reactive jobs are the next thing we’ll tackle—they offer so much power. For instance, instead of running a job every few minutes to see if a file has arrived in a folder on a server, we can use an event monitor to trigger a job immediately when the file arrives. This makes everything more responsive and efficient.”

Automation Payback: Dollars and Sense

Kevin is very pleased with Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise and automation. “There’s both a financial payback and a quality of service payback. We’ve never had a dedicated operator, so there’s financial savings. And, there’s the warm fuzzy you get from knowing that everything is running the way you designed it to run. Automation makes things simple. As long as I’m managing this part of the business, we’ll always have Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise. I don’t ever see it not being in our “arsenal” of tools—it’s a great product.”

By Bob Balderson