FirstOntario Credit Union: Automates Disparate Job Scheduling Tools with Universal Agent

FirstOntario Credit Union began in 1939 when a group of employees at the Steel Company of Canada created the Stelco Employees Credit Union. Their goal was to get the most out of their hard-earned money by creating a financial institution that identified with Main Street more than Bay Street.

Today, credit unions are very popular in Canada, with nearly 6 million Canadians trusting their local credit union for day-to-day banking. More than 126,000 Ontarians choose FirstOntario for their financial needs, from checking and savings accounts to loans and mortgages and highly qualified investment advice.

FirstOntario Credit Union was using disparate job scheduling tools for its IBMiSeries, Windows and Linux platforms. Using multiple job scheduling tools required the company to monitor each scheduler separately, decreasing visibility and increasing the amount of time and resources allocated to each job scheduling solution.

Unable to automate their processes in one environment, the IT team sought a solution that worked across platforms without specialization, while also standardizing processes and consolidating existing tools.

“We needed a solution to control all job scheduling centrally with visibility into all the jobs running within our infrastructure.”

MICHAEL J. WALSH
Director, Enterprise Technology, FirstOntario Credit Union

FirstOntario Credit Union selected Stonebranch’s Universal Agent, a solution that enabled the company to replace its diverse agent infrastructures with a single, enterprise-wide execution layer known as the enterprise execution environment.

This unique solution provides one common infrastructure, removing artificial barriers between platforms, departments and applications. Additionally, Universal Agent gave FirstOntario an end-to-end view of all workload activity within its infrastructure through Stonebranch’s single system image approach. This unique approach provides FirstOntario with central auditing and monitoring of workload activity across the enterprise, as well as central management of the entire workload infrastructure as if it were a single system.

Michael J. Walsh, director of enterprise technology for FirstOntario, explains: “We needed a solution to control all job scheduling centrally with visibility into all the jobs running within our infrastructure.”

“By automating our processes, there is no need for manual intervention and the amount of time and resources dedicated to our job scheduling process is greatly reduced.”

MICHAEL J. WALSH
Director, Enterprise Technology, FirstOntario Credit Union

Universal Agent consolidated FirstOntario’s job scheduling solutions and simplified compliance by providing a centralized audit trail, no matter where the workload was initiated.

“Universal Agent centralizes our job scheduling solutions, reducing risk because a system of checks and balances is in place throughout our IT infrastructure. We receive an automatic alert if a job has not been completed, or there is an error message,“ says Mr. Walsh.

Additionally, because Universal Agent is platform-independent, FirstOntario is now able to automate its entire job scheduling process, moving files between systems with minimized risk for errors. Allowing people to work across platforms without specialization improves IT maturity, while reducing hard and soft costs significantly.

Mr. Walsh adds, “By automating our processes, there is no need for manual intervention and the amount of time and resources dedicated to our job scheduling process is greatly reduced.”