Case Study # 2: Global Insight
Company:
Global Insight, Inc. is a privately
held company that brought
together the two most respected economic information companies in the world, DRI and WEFA. Global Insight provides the most comprehensive economic and financial information available on countries, regions and industries, using a unique combination of expertise, models, data and software within a common analytical framework to support planning and decision-making. The company has over 3,800 clients in industry, finance and government with revenues in excess of $80 million, over 600 employees and 23 offices in 13 countries covering North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Challenge:
Global Insight had multiple issues that needed to be resolved in their production environment. They had many complicated cross-platform job streams that needed to be scheduled, monitored and managed. The goal was to find a solution that would allow them to do all of these functions from a single centralized application. It was also critical for them that their administrative staff was notified immediately of job/batch successes and failures.
Solution:
After a long and extensive search for a solution, Global Insight selected Global ECS.
"Global ECS was the solution to our production requirements. We use GECS to schedule processes on all of our Operating Systems," said Kurt Cusack, Database/Systems Manager at Global Insight. "We utilize GECS to update and maintain internal databases as well as update and send reports and data files to clients. Internal database monitoring, maintenace, and updating have been seemlessly integrated as a result of the capabilities of GECS, and everything is centralized which is critical for us. The Administrative and Operations Staff can check one GUI for all pertinent information."
Global Insight has been using GECS to sucessfully schedule, monitor and manage their business processes since 1998. They run cross-platform job streams on Windows, HP-UX and Solaris.
Results:
Global Insight now depends and relies on GECS to handle the automation of their production environment. Many business processes have been automated utilizing the GECS framework allowing them to easily set-up and manage complex job streams across multiple platforms. Users have complete confidence that if there are issues in the production run, they will be notified so that corrective action may be taken immediately.
"We have been able to automate the daily administative tasks within Operations as well as other departments," said Cusack. "Users can now automate most of their daily tasks and run these tasks under one network userid assigned to their group. This makes network administration easier, since only one id is required to run all applications, macros, etc. for each department. The employees responsible for these processes are notified via GECS upon completion, and they can check the results or GECS can forward a results file via an e-mail attachment. The abilty of GECS to generate "Events" aids in notifying responsible employees of any failures, and can detail steps to take, within the Event Message, to correct the problem. Users are quite pleased with the scheduling and reporting capabilities of GECS, they can set their jobs and GECS can be relied on to complete each step and re-schedule the next instance."
Cusack went on to say, "We can't live without Global ECS!"
