Enterprises rely heavily on their batch systems to ensure smooth business operations. However, the batch systems undergo frequent changes. These are due to business changes such as change in workload, introduction of new batch processes, technology changes such as change in infrastructure, maintenance activities, and so on. These changes either take too long to plan or, if not planned well, lead to very brittle batch systems.

ignio AI.WorkloadManagement makes change-management easy by providing the ability to assess the impact of growth and adapt well before rolling out the changes. A batch architect can use ignio as a virtual prototyping engine and ask various questions to plan the change such as:

  • Will the month-end processing batch finish on time?
  • What will happen if I add another batch stream of 1000 jobs?
  • What will happen if the workload volume increases by 20%?
  • What will happen if I introduce a downtime of two hours?

This article present several examples of how ignio AI.WorkloadManagement can reduce the time to plan for change and ensure agile batch systems such that the batch architect and operations teams feel confident of accommodating growth and change. These scenarios vary from planning the year-end balances, to introducing a new product line, to planning of increase in workload in the holiday season, and planning batch migration, among others. These scenarios can be observed in verticals such as insurance, investment banking, retail, supply chain management, and many more. The following are such examples:

1. Planning for Business Growth

Investment banking organizations often undergo expansion of their customer base. This expansion results in increase in current accounts, savings accounts, as well as their respective. The batch systems responsible to perform end-of-day and end-of-month settlements of these accounts often observe significant delays and SLA violations due to the increased workload. Naturally, the batch architects are in the continuous catch-up mode to accommodate the growth. Most banking and financial organizations often observe at least 20-30 change scenario’s every year.

ignio can help in assessing impact of growth. It can model the rate of growth and predict the future growth. The batch architects can use ignio to predict the end-of-week and end-of-month batch. ignio can provide ahead-of-time notifications of potential SLA violations and help narrow down the hot-spots and critical paths that need attention. This can enable the architects to either renegotiate the batch SLAs or take corrective actions such as changing the batch schedules, adding additional compute on specific days of the month, or increasing the parallelism in the batch jobs.

2. Peak Season Planning

Retail industries experience significant increase in sales during the holiday season. They rely on on-time completion of various processes such as promotions, replenishments, billing, pricing and so on. Delay in these processes impact on sales, revenue, and customer experience. As per the reports, any delay in replenishment of shelves often lead to shrinkage of about 40,000 perishable items and can impact up to 30,000 transactions per month due to out-of-stock products. A delay in price tag generation can cost up to USD 360,000 per year for every store. Similarly, delay in rolling out promotions can lead to loss of up to 80,000 transactions per year.

During the holiday season, replenishment of shelves, promotions, and updates of price tags become very important. ignio can be used to predict the batch performance and assess the impact of the sales surge. Retail organizations can simulate the expected workload increase during the sale and plan for their batch processes to ensure smooth business operation.

3. Batch Maintenance and Upgrades

Batch development teams go through a process of continuous upgrades. These upgrades include adding new batch jobs, changing batch dependencies, modifying the batch code to accommodate change in business logic, and so on. While accommodating each new upgrade, the batch operations lack the insight into its potential side-effect on time and SLAs.

ignio can be used to perform a change-impact analysis of a new version before putting it in production. The batch operations teams can use this non-financial risk (NFR) report of the version upgrades to create a ‘what-if’ scenario using the levers such as change run time, start time, add/delete job and dependency, and so on. With ignio’s ‘what-if’ analysis, the batch operations assess if the new version roll-out is going to impact the time to finish the business deliverables. The operations teams can then either negotiate the SLAs with the business teams or ask for performance optimizations with the development teams.

4. Batch Migration

Many organizations have batch systems running since decades. These batch systems are usually running legacy scheduler and some organizations even have custom-built in-house schedulers. Migrating from these schedulers to newer modern systems is a time-taking and tedious process.

ignio can be used to assist the batch migration process and ignio’s blueprint can cut-across batch schedulers. It can model both the legacy and in-house schedulers as well as the new modern schedulers. ignio can further be used to create scenarios of migration from one scheduler to another. Users can then systematically plan migration phases and infrastructure changes, so that migration is executed smoothly while maintaining performance levels.

Enterprises undergo various changes throughout the year. Changes include new business offerings, customer growth, stringent regulatory compliance, and increase in service quality expectations. In such high pace of business as well as technological changes, the traditional approaches of relying on people and tacit knowledge to assess impact of change cannot catch-up. Traditional approaches are silo-based, and time and effort consuming. With its ability to perform change-impact analysis, ignio improves agility to drive rapid growth with smooth and risk-free change management. With ignio, enterprises can thus embark the journey of digital reimagination and prepare for tomorrow’s business.