Event-Driven and Dynamic Process Automation. Enabling the Real Time Enterprise with Redwood Software

Transcription

1 Event-Driven and Dynamic Process Automation Enabling the Real Time Enterprise with Redwood Software

2 Table of Contents Table of Contents... 2 Executive Summary... 3 What do we mean by Real-Time Process Scheduling?... 4 The Benefits of Event-Driven Process Automation... 4 Redwood Process Scheduling and Automation Overview... 6 Supporting the Emerging Enterprise... 8 Enabling the Real-Time Enterprise A Practical Example... 8 Summary

3 Executive Summary The modern business enterprise is in a state of constant change. The need to optimize business performance is often compromised by pressure to reduce costs and adapt to changing market conditions. The concept of just in time delivery has long been a mantra for the manufacturing industry where parts and materials are scheduled to appear just at the time that they are needed for the next stage in a process. This notion is now increasingly applied to the delivery of information services such as web based purchasing, telephone enquiry systems, on-line information retrieval and inter company transactions: the so called now economy. Added to this are increasing levels of legislation in many countries demanding such things as freedom of information, access to individual data and rapid notification of changes in commercial status that increase the need for timely access to information. These changes are creating the climate in which the real-time enterprise needs to become reality if businesses are to succeed. At the same time, many businesses also need to maintain their existing infrastructures and methods to service established and reliable lines of business that are not as dependent on the need for immediate access to information. The traditional background workload that has been the backbone for IT operations for many years is still very much a part of the IT landscape, although these too are subject to change such as decreasing batch windows and increased complexity. With 24/7 global enterprises we now in fact see batch windows substantially reduced or replaced altogether by near real-time processing. The challenge for the IT organization is to somehow adapt to the increasing demand for information now from both internal and external influences, maintain the stability of existing established business processes and often to integrate or fuse the two to optimize resource and information utilization. This white paper describes the emergence of the need for real-time, event driven process automation and how Redwood Process Scheduling by Redwood was designed specifically to address these needs. SAP and Redwood Software Redwood Process Scheduling by Redwood is the result of a close partnership between SAP AG and Redwood Software. Redwood has been an SAP certified ISV partner for many years, delivering solutions for SAP process scheduling and report management across SAP applications that are also integrated with the non-sap world. In March 2005 the two companies entered into a 10 year agreement that allowed for Redwood automation technology to be embedded into the SAP NetWeaver stack. This OEM arrangement provides all SAP customers with a no cost capability for managing, monitoring and automating SAP background workload, a capability that could optionally be upgraded to provide advanced features and non-sap management. This agreement also provided for SAP and Redwood to work together in the development of the next generation of SAP job scheduling interfaces for both the existing ABAP and emerging Java based SAP environments. 3

4 The agreement between SAP and Redwood was extended in January 2006 to allow SAP to sell the upgraded capabilities themselves or through the SAP channel. This full use version is sold by SAP as SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood. SAP is closely involved with the ongoing development of SAP Central Process Scheduling and validates and supports the solution itself. This means that SAP customers have a single point of contact for centralized process scheduling and SAP business application support. The features, capabilities and benefits described in this document apply to both the SAP distributed SAP Central Job Scheduling and Cronacle for SAP solutions from Redwood. What do we mean by Real-Time Process Scheduling? Modern business processes often rely on some sort of trigger or event to initiate them. For example, an event might be a customer putting a call into a service center to report a fault with a domestic appliance, an individual accessing a government web-site to retrieve some electoral information or a change in the financial status of an organization that triggers the need for compliance with some legislation. Such events are often unpredictable due to the nature of customer demand and interaction; further their parameters are unknown until they occur. Common to all is the need for access to and the processing of timely information. This concept of being sensitive to the needs of the business and its processes at all times is the real-time element of such an environment. Moreover, real-time processing describes the way in which an enterprise may respond to internal or external business activity. The IT infrastructure has to provide rapid access to information when it is requested. We are not concerned here with the sort of real-time processing that is typically associated with, for example, environmental control systems at nuclear power stations or flight deck systems on an airliner. The real-time enterprise is concerned with timely response to events or triggers to provide a level of service that is acceptable to its customers and ensures the efficiency of the business. Customers calling a support center to report faults want to know that their problems are being dealt with and that they will receive a replacement part or a call from an engineer within an acceptable time. The web user retrieving electoral information wants reasonable response times to the enquiry with the required information displayed quickly and without errors. The SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence user needs to know that report requests are dealt with efficiently and that the report will be created quickly using the right information to allow accurate business decision making. Similarly the CEO wishing to access financial data to meet strict statutory compliance deadlines will want to be able to retrieve that data at short notice, but without impacting on the day to day operation of the business. The Benefits of Event-Driven Process Automation As we have seen, emphasis is being placed on timely and accurate response to events for the execution of business processes, many of which require integration across SAP and non-sap applications. The number and nature of events varies enormously and they can 4

5 occur at any time of any day or night, such is the un-predictable nature of the modern business environment. The action taken in response to an event can become an event in itself and trigger a subsequent chain of processes. Business processes are driven by these events with the actions taken entirely dependent on what the events are, when they occur and where they originated. The events themselves will be many and various, some of the more common examples being: On-line requests for information and/or web services. Inter company or department information exchange (through EDI): As part of inter-departmental or extended Supply Chain interaction Completion of a specific set of tasks that will result in subsequent processing, based entirely on the (unpredictable) outcome of the original tasks. Ad Hoc end-user demands Order-to-cash processes Sarbanes-Oxley compliance processes Invoicing & billing Consumer and B2B product replenishment Metering & RFID Real-time business activity is partly a result of the internet and computer (or information) age. The always-on 24/7 global economy dictates that the speed of fulfillment is often a key competitive advantage that distinguishes one organization from another. Those who serve their customers quicker (with the right product or service at the right time) are often the leaders. Moreover, as business process differentiation overtakes the differentiation of products and services as a key competitive driver, organizations find that time-to-market is mission-critical and that real-time awareness and reaction to business events is essential. Increasingly, as a result of technology enabled global economics, much of the modern business process and when it is required to execute cannot be accurately predicted. Because of this the traditional batch based straight through processing approach may not always be appropriate. Furthermore, it is not always practical to schedule business activities around the demands of background processing without one impacting on the performance or availability of the other. The real-time enterprise is about providing the means for addressing these issues whilst meeting overall business objectives. Using events to trigger processing is one way of managing these issues that will enable: Improved business responsiveness to external events. The ability to perform processes based on up to the minute information. A framework for integrating multiple business processes without the need for radical changes to applications. Increased capability to respond to change. Better management of process dependencies. 5

6 Of course it is not simply a case of implementing a means for reacting to business events in a given way. It is necessary to not only manage reaction to these events, but to also manage the integration of the event-driven process with existing scheduled or batch processes. Managing the two together ensures that end-to-end critical system performance is not compromised. Particularly as organizations embrace enterprise software applications to help better manage their businesses it becomes clear that traditional batch scheduled processes and event-driven processes must be integrated to minimize performance issues and improve customer response times. This so called business process fusion, will often involve multiple applications such as SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft and will usually span many operating system environments including the mainframe, UNIX, Linux and Windows. These interdependencies must be managed, leading to an architecture based on the delivery of service levels that are acceptable to the user or customer. Redwood Process Scheduling and Automation Overview Many solutions exist for the traditional straight through batch job scheduling approach to managing business processes. These solutions are, typically, based on an underlying technology that was suitable for the days when organizations ran heavy overnight batch workloads on dedicated mainframe processors. The batch approach makes a key assumption: that there will be some period during the day or night when there will be sufficient time and system resource to ensure that the batch work will complete without impacting on-line users. This technology is not necessarily appropriate for today s diverse infrastructures when there is no guarantee that resources will be idle and waiting at the time required for the batch workload to run. Additionally, these solutions also tend to work on the concept of a daily schedule that allows planned jobs or tasks to be scheduled with specific input parameters during the daily schedule load but which do not easily allow for last minute (i.e. real-time) changes to the schedule should some unpredictable business activity take precedence. Redwood Process Scheduling has been designed from the ground up in a different and unique way to other products. Redwood Process Scheduling is not just a job scheduling solution; it is a real-time event-driven process automation solution. At the heart of Redwood Process Scheduling is an automation engine and Repository designed to monitor for and react to business events anywhere in the managed environment. Redwood Process Scheduling will respond to such events by executing processes using information passed by the trigger events to ensure that the processes executed are running in conjunction with up-to-the-minute data. As well as responding to events, Redwood Process Scheduling can also raise events that can: trigger further processes, cause alarms to be raised to a higher level systems management console (for example via SMS, or SNMP trap), be passed as parameters to subsequent processes. Automatic load balancing assures optimization of resources across the network by making sure that tasks are run on systems that are least utilized. This has the effect of increasing performance, reducing the time taken for process execution, reducing contention and often allows organizations to defer acquisition of additional hardware. Complex dependencies 6

7 between processes in different applications and operating system environments can be resolved from a single point of control. Capable of running traditional batch schedules as well as taking the more flexible, dynamic event-driven route, Redwood Process Scheduling can integrate processes of both types efficiently across disparate SAP and non-sap applications. Complex and dynamic calendars can take account of any degree of complicated time based dependencies to define when a process can run such that if an event occurs to trigger a process, it will only run under the appropriate calendar conditions. Low level integration with SAP applications, coupled with the ability to also manage other applications and integration with systems management frameworks such as Tivoli Enterprise Console and HP OpenView provides the assurance that critical workload is dealt with in the correct manner for the environment and that dependencies between applications can be managed without specialized modifications. With support for all major operating system environments including Windows, all popular implementations of UNIX, Linux, IBM z/os, IBM i5 OS and OpenVMS plus a unique level of support for Java and J2EE application environments, Redwood Process Scheduling provides a single administrative console for management and automation of the entire process environment. By automating the execution of processes in real-time, Redwood Process Scheduling delivers many benefits to the business such as: Reduced execution time for long running job suites: load balancing processes across multiple systems, immediate execution of follow on processes and simultaneous execution of tasks that are not dependent on each other all helps to reduce the overall elapsed time taken for long running suites to complete. Performance improvements delivered through extremely high levels of job submission: In benchmark tests Redwood Process Scheduling has been proved to create, schedule, execute and monitor in excess of 30 jobs per second on a single server. Simplified management of mixed environments: Because Redwood Process Scheduling supports all major environments. Management overheads are significantly reduced through the use of a single console for all process execution. Staff responsible for operations do not require operating system or application specific knowledge. Reduced manual errors: Automation is recognized as a key means for reducing the errors that can be associated with manual intervention. Real-time response to business events: By using an event-driven approach Redwood Process Scheduling is able to respond quickly to the external events that drive business processes. There is no concept of a daily schedule load with Redwood Process Scheduling so any process, once defined to the system, can be invoked at any time even if it has not been run for weeks, months or even years. When the trigger event occurs, the process will run with the input information that is relevant now. 7

8 Supporting the Emerging Enterprise As more organizations adopt new, open, standards based technologies for their application environments, the issues of integrated automation for business processes become more complex. Java and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) are gaining traction as the development platform of choice for a growing number of IT organizations. Unfortunately Java, despite having many advantages as a development and application environment, does not typically integrate well with non-java environments and has very limited native systems management capabilities. Redwood Process Scheduling addresses these issues through its Java integration capabilities. Redwood Process Scheduling uses core event-driven scheduling technology that is designed to manage and integrate with other Java applications. Running in its own Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or inside an existing JVM environment such as SAP NetWeaver Web Application Server, Redwood Process Scheduling complements and enhances the Java environment by taking advantage of its strengths and providing solutions to compensate for its shortcomings in handling time and event based processing. By enabling communication and dependencies between Java and non-java workloads, Redwood Process Scheduling ensures that all aspects of business processing can be integrated from the mainframe, through UNIX and Windows to the emerging web and Java based environments that are becoming increasingly critical. Enabling the Real-Time Enterprise A Practical Example Because Redwood Process Scheduling was designed from the start as an event driven management tool it is extremely flexible and can act as a powerful automation platform for much more than simple job processing. The constant awareness of and response to business events makes Redwood Process Scheduling an ideal backbone for the real-time enterprise. The following example is based on a real world scenario implemented by a Redwood customer. This customer, a major book distributor, provides the connection between publishers and book retailers, packing and shipping some 200,000 books a day to over 1500 bookstores. Each of the stores creates a daily file of books that are required from the distributor. In order to ensure efficient and accurate distribution of books an automated system was required to upload orders from each store, generate the order picking list for warehouse staff and distribute updated catalogue information to each store. The process scheduling solution detects order files the moment they arrive from each of the remote stores, if an order file is not received from a store during the designated time period an alert is raised. The order information collected from each store is used as input to the order processing system so that picking lists are prepared for warehouse staff. The Redwood solution is also responsible for managing all updates and reporting jobs that need to run to provide management information, generate stock orders from publishers and so on. Timing of such an operation is critical to ensure accurate and timely picking by warehouse staff. Real-time efficiency ensures that the warehouse packing slips for each order are generated at the same time that the box for a particular store is moving 8

9 along the conveyor belt waiting to be filled. Address labels, stickers and shipping notes are similarly produced to meet the boxes as they progress through the warehouse to ultimately coincide with collection by the courier. Should any important job fail, operations staff are automatically notified and recovery actions initiated. Through the automation delivered by the Redwood solution the distributor can guarantee service levels to its customers ensuring turnaround of orders within acceptable timescales. Because Redwood Process Scheduling is not application or operating system environment specific it can also be used to manage regular IT housekeeping tasks such as backup processing. Further benefits can be obtained by integrating the application workload with systems tasks. For example, rather than the backup starting at a given time, make it start as soon as the production workload has completed maximizing use of available time. Integration into systems management frameworks through SNMP, log messages or automatic function calls ensures that any failures are highlighted as soon as they occur. Such integration can go beyond just notification of failed jobs. Redwood Process Scheduling uses real-time resource monitoring to track various system metrics on each system in the environment such as CPU utilization, memory usage and paging rates. Not only is this information useful for load balancing, it could also be used to alert operations staff of underlying stress in the environment so that pre-emptive action can be taken to correct the situation before a failure occurs. Summary Maintaining the balance between support for existing business processes and the need to adapt to newer technologies more suited to modern business practices is a challenge. By implementing an infrastructure that can integrate both of these environments through intelligent, event driven automation the IT organization can free up valuable resources to focus on other aspects of running the business. Align the automation with the business itself and the framework is in place for establishing a real-time, business event driven enterprise focused on the timely and reliable delivery of goods and services. Redwood Process Scheduling is designed specifically to operate in this way. Tight integration with leading applications such as SAP leads to extensive knowledge of the application environment. Process execution through the awareness of and reaction to realtime events allows activity to happen at precisely the right moment, using the most current information available: maximizing efficiency and use of available resources. Through its ability to manage incredibly high levels of throughput, its resilience in supporting mission critical systems, the dynamic management of business critical workload across multiple operating systems and its seamless integration with key application environments, Redwood Process Scheduling is an ideal solution for the challenges of integrating real-time SAP and non-sap business application environments with existing, established and still important background processing needs of the enterprise. 9

10 About Redwood Software Founded in 1993, Redwood Software ( enables organizations to maximize the value of their IT infrastructure and business information through effective, real-time event-driven process automation, job scheduling and document process automation solutions. Redwood has more than 3,200 customer installations worldwide from financial, retail, and manufacturing giants on the Fortune Global 500 list of the world s largest corporations to community hospitals, universities and other regionally run businesses. Redwood is a global organization with offices in Germany, the Netherlands, the U.S., the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Redwood is a registered trademark and Cronacle is a trademark of Redwood Software. SAP, SAP NetWeaver and all other SAP products and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and several other countries. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners. Redwood Software All rights reserved. 10