Logistics Company Likes UC4 for Job Scheduling Software

Published: June 9, 2009

by Alex Woodie

Inmar, a provider of reverse logistics solutions for more than 1,700 companies, has licensed UC4 Software's Workload Automation Suite to help it streamline job scheduling activities across i5/OS, Windows, and Unix servers.

From its headquarters in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Inmar and its various subsidiaries provide a range of logistics, reverse logistics, and promotions management solutions. The company operates more than 3 million square feet of warehouse space at 40 facilities across the continent, and counts retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers among its customers.

One of Inmar's subsidiaries, Stratapult, provides IT hosting and custom development services for Inmar clients. Stratapult runs a mix of customized i OS, Unix, Windows .NET, and Sybase applications for customers in its data centers. While the diverse mix of technologies is good for meeting customer needs, it can make it a challenge to manage effectively.

In particular, Inmar needed a job scheduler that could cut across platforms. "We evaluated a number of vendors for workload automation solutions and the decision came down to UC4 and another large IT vendor," Doug Bordner, Inmar's vice president of technology, says in a press release. "We selected UC4 because it clearly was the best solution to integrate with our custom homegrown .NET, Unix, and iSeries OS/400 applications."

The Workload Automation Suite runs on Unix, Linux, or Windows servers, and deploys agents to all major operating systems, including IBM i (OS/400), mainframe, BS2000, OpenVMS, and others. The software allows users to schedule processing to occur in several ways, including by calendars, by events, by dynamic data changes, according to resource thresholds or resource availability, or when message queues, database triggers, or file arrivals occur. It features a graphical interface that makes it easy for administrators to see view jobs running on servers and the resources they're consuming.

The Stratapult division of Inmar is currently implementing the Workload Automation Suite to automate various processes, including handling returned goods and recalls, and for other reverse logistics processes within the consumer goods, healthcare, electronics, and other industries.

Bordner continues: "We envision that one day all of our jobs will run distributed, yet be controlled from a single, central platform, so processing will be both faster and more consistent for our clients, while allowing our support, operations, and data center staff to be more focused and effective in managing business exceptions to our client's satisfaction."

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