A. Schulman and the Robot Products - A Future in Plastics

Cars, homes, and toys—can you think of one big thing they have in common? Well, they all use plastics, the kind of high-performance plastic compounds that A. Schulman supplies to markets around the world. Plastic products and compounds from A. Schulman are the materials of choice for industries ranging from automotive equipment, construction, and home improvement, to packaging, telecommunications, garden supplies, toys, and more. Today, A. Schulman is one of the most advanced performance plastics companies anywhere, with offices, manufacturing facilities, and distribution centers delivering high-quality products to a global customer base.

We see the potential to have everything under one umbrella as we expand globally.

Tim Winnicki is the applications manager at their corporate headquarters in Akron, Ohio. Their computing environment is an IBM® System i® model 550 that primarily runs their U.S. operations. In addition, they have a second System i located in Europe and a server-based system in Mexico. They use Oracle Hyperion Financial Management software for financial reporting. On the System i, they use the Infor ERP System 21 for enterprise resource planning, SEQUEL ViewPoint® for data access, and the Robot products for automated operations.

As Tim explains, “We’ve been using the Robot products for more than 10 years. We first purchased Robot/SCHEDULE® [job scheduling and batch job management] and Robot/REPLAY® [interactive job management]. We wanted to use variables to schedule events that require a date to be input to run automatically. So, we built a Replay object for those jobs and replaced the date with a variable to run them unattended. Now, we have more than 150 Replay objects and more than 200 jobs scheduled in Robot/SCHEDULE.

“We also perform dependency processing. When our Master Production Scheduling (MPS) process runs each morning, a job scans orders, gets requisitions, runs MPS, and produces some back-end reports. Each phase depends on the completion of another. If one job fails, the rest of the jobs stop so that nothing gets “out of sync”. We do the same thing with our nightly invoicing process. We have a group job that’s set up to process invoices, print them, and post them to our general ledger. If one process stops, the rest of the group jobs are placed on hold until we can look at it. That way, we avoid posting invoices that aren’t fully processed. Before Robot/SCHEDULE and Robot/REPLAY, we had operators manually running these tasks daily. Now, they do more value-added tasks, like writing queries.”

Tim likes many of Robot/SCHEDULE’s scheduling features. “We really like how easy it is to set up month-end jobs. In Robot/SCHEDULE, you can run a job on a specific day of the month for month-end processes. And, you can set up a job to run at a certain time for any number of days of the week, even multiple times daily. For example, we have a job that allocates inventory to our orders. Instead of setting up ten separate tasks to run ten times a day, I can build one task and run it ten different times. It really cuts down on setup time.”

Robot/SCHEDULE also handles audit requests, as Tim found out. “We’re a publicly owned company, so we are audited. One of the biggest things our auditors want to see is evidence that a job ran successfully. Robot/SCHEDULE keeps track of the completion schedules of each job, and whether they completed successfully or terminated. We can generate a daily report that shows the jobs scheduled to run and their status. We check the report, sign off on it, and store it to handle an auditor requirement. Every Monday we get a report of abnormal endings—anything that terminated abnormally on the system, such as printers that needed to be restarted, and so forth. That handles another audit requirement. And, to spot potential hackers, we have an audit report to monitor password failures and people trying to sign on.”

Tim has learned that Robot/SCHEDULE helps with troubleshooting and job schedule maintenance. “Robot/SCHEDULE does a good job tracking the job log and associating it with the individual task. If there’s a problem, you know exactly where to look in the job log and find out what went wrong—usually it’s spelled out for you. With a standard scheduler, when you have a problem you search all over to find out what’s wrong. Robot/SCHEDULE indicates whether the job terminated and if you have to rerun it. That helps us troubleshoot quickly.”

As they went to one shift at their corporate office, they wanted to be able to monitor their system 24/7 without an operator. So, they added Robot/CONSOLE® for message management and resource monitoring, and Robot/ALERT® for event notification. Currently, they have about 350 users, four developers, three network analysts, two business analysts, and no operators. As Tim explains, one person runs their Help Desk operation. “We integrated Robot/CONSOLE and Robot/ALERT into our Help Desk philosophy. During non-standard business hours, when there’s an error, Robot/CONSOLE uses Robot/ALERT to send a message to a pager. We’re notified proactively, so we get involved before there’s a business impact—before users call in. We constantly monitor the pulse of our system. We also monitor QSYSOPR and disk utilization. If we hit high disk usage, a warning message is issued to protect us from runaway jobs. We even use Robot/CONSOLE to send messages to a Blackberry where we can answer them directly.”

Training, support, and ease-of-use are potential show stoppers with any product, but Tim has been really impressed with the entire Robot product package. “When we purchased the products, Help/Systems trainers came on-site and they were great. We also tried some Webinars, and I attended a user group session for hands-on training. You don’t need a lot of people to learn the products and it doesn’t take very long to learn them. As a result, it’s been very easy to automate.

Now, we have more than 150 Replay objects and more than 200 jobs scheduled in Robot/SCHEDULE.

“Customer support is another Help/Systems strength. Recently, we were planning to move to V6R1 and upgrade our products. One of the Help/Systems support people spent an hour on the phone with us in an online session, took over our system in a test environment, and walked us through the upgrade. When we were done in the test environment, we walked through the “real” upgrades on our own. It’s amazing how smoothly it went—it was a non-event. In fact, the Robot products were the first products we decided to upgrade because of how easy the process was.”

For the near future, expanded globalization is right over the horizon. As Tim explains, “Right now, we’re looking into a global ERP system that’s definitely going to present some challenges. Because you’re in different time zones with more operations running 24/7, scheduling jobs is more difficult. As a result, we have to be more creative with both managing and scheduling. I watched some Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise® [enterprise job scheduling] demonstrations and I’m both interested and impressed. We see the potential to have everything under one umbrella as we expand globally.” For A. Schulman and Tim Winnicki, the future is easily within reach with the Robot products.