JAMS Enhances JD Edwards Implementation at Crane Group

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Crane Group (www.CraneGroup.com) is a private holding and management company based in Columbus, Ohio. Crane’s holdings comprise a network of local, regional, and global companies in both manufacturing and the building trades. The company’s products and services are known for being innovative, high quality, and backed by some of the strongest warranties in the industries they serve.

THE CHALLENGES

Over the years, Crane has grown substantially through organic growth as well as acquisitions. With this growth, Crane has both developed and inherited a multitude of tasks that run across disparate applications and servers. Ideally, Crane wanted to centralize the management of all of the tasks running across the enterprise which included reports, re-occurring postings, maintenance tasks, and more.

Prior to implementing JAMS, Crane Group relied on a hodgepodge of tools like Windows Task Scheduler, SQL Server Agent and the scheduling capabilities native to JD Edwards. The issue was that none of these schedulers (Windows, SQL, JDE) are robust solutions and none are really designed for the enterprise. Crane needed comprehensive capabilities like job dependency triggers, scheduling windows where jobs can only run during certain times, workflow support to view application interdependencies, parameter handling and comprehensive calendaring support for the various fiscal calendars the IT group supported.

THE SOLUTIONS

Kevin Kuhlwein, the Director of IT at Crane, stated that “JAMS has all of the features we would expect in a scheduling product and more. We create a lot of jobs that are identical but run on different instances of JD Edwards and on various servers for our portfolio companies. JAMS gives us a centralized scheduler for all of these processes.”

“We use JD Edwards as our ERP package and JAMS provides a strong scheduler that allows us to better monitor jobs that may run longer than they should or miss their execution window. JAMS also gives us a graphical view into the various dependencies between jobs and applications. JAMS allows us to develop logic in one central repository and execute it on all of our JD Edwards installations.”

THE BENEFITS

JAMS has become a critical piece of Crane’s order processing system. Kuhlwein added “our electronic orders are completely automated where JAMS glues together disparate systems into one workflow process integrated with our ERP system.”

“JAMS is a ‘set it and forget it’ application that allows us to not have to worry about applications failing. If anything does go wrong, JAMS sends us proactive alerts. With JAMS in place, we notify our end users when there are problems with our EDI, not the other way around.”