Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) has announced that American Greetings Corp. a leading supplier of greeting cards and related products for the social expression industry, is using CA`s AutoSys software to centralize and automate crucial job scheduling tasks for its major distribution centres across the United States.
AutoSys is enabling American Greetings to initiate jobs across both legacy and client/server architectures, promoting substantially higher levels of user efficiency as the company expands its business into eCommerce and other new venues.
AutoSys is an enterprise-wide scheduling solution that allows a high degree of mainframe interaction. It provides the reliability, flexibility and scalability needed for an open systems environment, and allows American Greetings to conveniently trigger files from its legacy systems over to the client/server side, making it possible for the company to schedule nearly any job regardless of the technology resources involved.
AutoSys centralizes and automates the scheduling and management of jobs in UNIX and Windows NT environments, offering such features as self-correcting job control, centralized system-wide monitoring and programmable error recovery. Within the realm of eBusiness, AutoSys accommodates the massive processing of jobs common to Web-based enterprises by providing the most rapid and reliable Internet job management capabilities.
The scope of American Greetings` distribution infrastructure is both complex and diverse. Initially based on OS/390, the company`s distribution centres have increasingly become dependent on RS/6000 servers and other complex client/server technologies. This has made the job scheduling function particularly difficult.
Having used CA-Jobtrac for many years, American Greetings wanted to bring the same levels of functionality and reliability over to the client/server side. Because AutoSys interfaces extremely well with CA-Jobtrac and also requires very little maintenance, it was the obvious solution for the company.
The robustness and simplicity of AutoSys also eliminates the need for in-depth user training, ensuring immediate improvements in productivity while helping control costs. With AutoSys, American Greetings personnel can perform nearly any fulfilment task - from processing orders to printing invoices - simply by pushing a button.
As an added benefit, American Greetings has deployed AutoSys in conjunction with CA ` s Unicenter TNG eBusiness management solution. The comprehensive system now allows American Greetings operators to track the health of its entire computing infrastructure - including all systems, applications and databases - as well as the performance of specifically executed jobs.
The company believes the centralized scheduling and automation capabilities delivered by AutoSys will be especially beneficial as it moves further into the world of eBusiness and engages in a greater range of activities apart from card distribution. AutoSys and CA-Jobtrac will be critically important as American Greetings expandz and the level of eBusiness activity at its distribution centres intensifies.
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Computer Associates
Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA) the world`s leading business software company, delivers the end-to-end infrastructure to enable eBusiness through innovative technology, services and education. CA has 20,000 employees worldwide and had revenue in excess of $6 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2000. For more information, visit www.ca.com.
American Greetings is the world`s largest publicly held creator, manufacturer and distributor of greeting cards and social expression products. Its staff of artists, designers and writers comprises one of the largest creative departments in the world and helps consumers "say it best" by supplying more than 15,000 greeting card designs to retail outlets in nearly every English-speaking country. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, American Greetings employs more than 21,000 associates around the world and drives more than $2.1 billion in annual sales. For more information on the company, visit http://www.americangreetings.com on the World Wide Web.