How UMW Reclaimed 42 Hours a Week by Automating ISIR Loads

Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us for today’s webinar, How the University of Mary Washington Reclaimed 42 Hours a Week by Automating ISIR Loads.

My name is Cody Gondyke. I’m from Fortra and we make JAMS Job Scheduler, the enterprise job scheduling solution that centralizes and automates your critical batch processes.

Today I’m going to give you a quick summary of who we are, and walk you through a start to finish overview of the University of Mary Washington’s automation journey. Then our Banner automation expert Louis Diaz is going to take you through some really neat stuff including some extra use cases, the features and functionality you’ll have access to with workload automation, and really the cherry on top here, Lewis is going to take you through the steps to automate ISIR loads, so that you can see how it would look in your own environment.

If you have any questions, please go ahead and post those in the chat window. That’s accessible through the panel over on the right hand side of your screen. We will be monitoring those as we go, and if we don’t get to your question right away, don’t worry. We’ll take some time at the end of our webinar to answer as many of those questions as we can. So let’s get started.

Automating Ellucian Banner is our focus today, but it’s always good to know that here at Fortra we really can solve any IT problems you’re facing. That’s from secure file transfers to network monitoring. If you have an IT need, we have an IT solution. And no matter where you are, you probably have a Fortra office close to home, as you can see here.

And we do have dedicated JAMS offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, which means you can get 24/7 support for our JAMS workload automation software. Our team has deployed JAMS to hundreds of customers worldwide, and you can see a small sample of our customers here.

I like to say it’s a general rule that you’re going to interact with a JAMS customer today. Whether that’s watching a show on a Vizio TV, maybe building a bird feeder with Milwaukee power tools, checking the forecast with AccuWeather, or going for a run in Nike sneakers. You’ve probably also noticed a couple of institutions on this slide, like UCLA and Harvard. Of course, we have many more customers in the education space, but there’s only so many logos you can fit on a page. So this is still just some of our education customers other than what you already saw.

There are two neat things about the institutions you’re looking at here. The first is that Villanova, on the bottom there, became a JAMS customer just a few months before they became the 2017 Big East champs. Is that a coincidence? Absolutely. But it’s also really neat and I like it as a little piece of trivia.

The second is that Louis, our Banner expert here with me today, has been onsite with or trained a majority of these customers. I think the one exception is the University of Stavanger and that’s because they’re in Norway.

We also have an incredibly strong partner network, as you can see here. We’re an Ellucian technology partner, of course. And we also have strategic partners like Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, and belong to IT organizations like PCI for security. And last, I like to say everything that we do at Fortra is for your success. That’s from incorporating your needs directly into our development cycle, to offering professional services and support services that jumpstart your workload automation. But that’s enough about us. Let’s talk about the University of Mary Washington.

So UMW is a selective public institution in Virginia. They end up getting over 6,000 FAFSA applications every year, and administer quite a bit in financial assistance.

The university had been a long time Banner user, since the SunGard era circa 2004. And a few years ago the university moved to a Ruffalo Noel Levitz tuition model. And that uses a matrix of academic ratings and EFC bands to find the best tuition discounts.

It only took a year of manually running Banner jobs for each of those 55 groups and EFC bands before the university decided that they needed to improve how they were leveraging Banner. So they had Ellucian performed some business process modeling for the university and Ellucian ended up coming back and recommending an automation tool for Banner that was going to cost the University somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000.

I know some of you might’ve just whistled and fell back in your chairs. Heidi Hunter-Goldsworthy, UMW’s Director of Financial Aid at the time, had a similar reaction. She described the tool’s inflated price point to us as, “Not even a remote possibility for UMW.” And that’s really what kicked off the search.

And so Heidi set out looking for something that was going to work well, was going to be very flexible, had good customer service, and of course that the University was going to be willing to write the check for. And they found JAMS.

Prior to JAMS, the University had no experience with job scheduling software, so ease of use and customer service was really important. The main Banner user, and the one that had been manually running Banner processes, found JAMS to be straightforward, and leveraged the JAMS support team’s expertise, their quick response times, and interactive screen-share sessions to really kickstart the university’s automation.

He described it as, “Excellent customer service,” and that’s what we hear often. But for us customer service has always been a way of life. I like to say that we’re more of a partner for you than a vendor, and that our engineers are rock stars. And they really are invested in making you successful. If you question my claim that our engineers are rock stars, I really challenge you to try and reach out to our support team and see for yourself.

But going on, once JAMS was in place, the University saw really great benefits. And one that they didn’t think of prior to looking for a solution was auditing. So, every few years auditors would come in and pull hundreds of files. But by automating processes in JAMS, the auditors are looking for standardized operating procedures, rather than looking for human errors.

I think Heidi probably summed it up best. She said, “We can pull a JAMS process for auditors, and they can see it run through every step. Every five years they come over and pull hundreds of files and double check student aid. Now they’ll come over and we’ll pull electronic records for them. They’re not looking for human errors anymore. They’re looking for standardized operating procedures. That makes them happy.” And I have to be honest, it’s very seldom that I hear that auditors are happy, so I consider this a big win.

They also got the flexibility that they wanted. So if a regulation changed, and I think we all know regulations can change pretty often, or some other updates need to happen in a process, the university is good to go. They’re all set with JAMS. That flexibility and reliability also extends to who’s in the office. So if someone was out sick, if there are meetings, if somebody is on vacation, or something needs to be moved around in a schedule, JAMS is going to handle those changes in stride, and keep running processes, keep processing aid, no matter who’s out sick, or what time of day it is.

So bringing us back to aid, I mentioned how the University was manually running processes for a year. That was taking them about 50 hours a week. So let’s take a look at what those 50 hours might’ve looked like, and then talk about what happened to that process with JAMS in place.

This flow chart is just a quick and simple example of the kinds of things that made the manual process take so long. Let’s say Joe User is responsible for running Banner jobs and needs to run an ISIR load through 55 packaging groups in each student class. It’s going to take him a week or more to get it processed.

So, following the flow, it’s 9:00 AM. Joe is in, he has his file watching hat on, and he’s waiting for an ISIR load to arrive. And he might go do some other stuff, but at 10 o’clock he realizes that file’s in. He uploads it to the system. 10:15 he’s able to kick off a processing job, and half an hour later that job’s going to finish. He’s going to be able to kick off the processing job for group two.

Then Joe is going to go to an extended lunch with some colleagues. And he’s not going to get back for a while. So it’s going to be three o’clock before he’s able to start group three. And then a little bit later Joe realizes he fat fingered one of the parameters for group three. So he has to rerun the group, after it finished with an error. It’s then after four o’clock before Joe gets group four running. And now group five starts and it’s not going to finish before Joe leaves for the end of the day.

So, there are still 50 groups that the ISIR load has to go through to be considered finished. And let’s say Joe is going to be on vacation tomorrow, or out sick. Now, this is the type of manual load, and really where all of that time builds up, because it takes a human being to kick everything off.

With JAMS, UMW isn’t running processing through 55 aid packaging groups manually anymore. They actually increased, they’re running, through JAMS, 120 packaging groups. So every group, every one of 120 groups is a Banner process. And JAMS is running those over and over again, until each load is finished. So it’s going through hundreds of decision points every time.

Now JAMS handles that entire process for the University from the ISIR load import all the way to where it’ll create a letter file for them to print letters. So the entire thing is a JAMS process, self-contained. And that whole process, front to back, takes about 20 minutes now for every ISIR file that comes in. The result is that JAMS has reduced the time spent on ISIR loads from 10 hours a day to eight hours a week. And there it is. That’s the 42 hours that the University got back with JAMS.

Now we’ll go to the part that you’ve probably been waiting for, Louis, our Banner automation expert is going to take you through the process to actually configure one of these ISIR load imports. So you’ll see under the hood a bit, and get a great idea of how you can leverage JAMS yourself. Louis has helped dozens of universities realize the same time kind of time savings as UMW. He architected and implemented JAMS at dozens of other companies. And he coauthored our JAMS training curriculum. So, Louis take it away.

Thank you Cody. And thanks everyone for joining. So, the first thing that we’re going to talk about are the preliminary stages when you’re looking at an overall project here.

So as with many projects, the first thing that can be done is creating an outline. So we call this that prepping stage. So here is where we can outline the steps of our data load process, determine which account each step will run as, create a dedicated user to run that in JAMS. And then here’s a quick example of an ISIR load process. But this step is absolutely critical, and it really is as easy as answering just a few questions. Some of them being, what does the process currently look like? Or, what accounts should it run as? And more importantly, when should that process run?

And this definitely matters because preparing in this way eliminates the guesswork. And we’re essentially creating a checklist. And chances are we will find patterns, and JAMS allows us to recycle those efforts. And this really does save us a lot of time in the long run.

So after we do define an outline for our process, we can start taking a look at how we would create the individual Banner job in JAMS. And while JAMS will allow you to create a unique job name, it still will be scheduling those Banner jobs. So for tracking purposes we can use the same Banner job name when adding it to JAMS. In this case we’ve chosen an RCRTP 18, and then we have to ensure that we are selecting the correct Banner procedure method.

And now we can configure the job exactly as we need. So another question you might ask is, which Banner environment do I want to target? Well, JAMS will allow you to target more than one Banner environment at a time. So you might kick a process off in Banner test, like we were doing here, and then you can kick things off to Banner QA, and then finally prod.

The next thing that we would need to do is select our Banner job. So from the JAMS source editor we have a drop down menu that’s available so that we can quickly select the desired Banner job. And that is based on the environment that we chose in our previous step.

And after we select the job, we then just choose the user who is this job supposed to execute or authenticate as? And then lastly we can start getting to some of the peripherals. One of the most important ones is determining that parameter selection. So we know that all of those Banner jobs behave differently based on those input values. And here we have the option to choose between any pre-configured parameter sets, or we can go with the standard job or even user level defaults. And then some additional fields towards the bottom there. Maybe you don’t want to include the .log or .lis file output in the JAMS log file. That’s an option that you have to select from.

Now we’re going to talk about the dynamic parameters. So here we can see the populated parameters from our Banner job. In the last screen we just went with the job level defaults, and moving forward the JAMS features allow our Banner parameters to dynamically receive values based on date changes, maybe query results, and we can even have JAMS verify any inbound file names for us to push it to our arguments. And again, this is very important because it saves the user time from having to gather the correct input information. And then maybe more importantly, it will help to eliminate those human errors, so that jobs run smoothly the first time.

Now we did leave a couple of those parameters blank in that last screen. And on this screen we’re going to see exactly why we did that. So, now that we have created the individual Banner job, we can link them together really easily. So we have a drag and drop interface where we can essentially put those jobs in the corresponding orders. And then we can pass the values to our individual jobs from, beginning context that it’s in.

So as you see here, we have two of the same RCRTP 18 jobs. In that first instance, we are going to pass a value of EDE for that second argument. And then for the second instance we can pass anything else that we need, based on those parameter options that I mentioned before. And this definitely matters, because it allows you to re-use your jobs so that they’re context driven. So instead of having to manage a hundred jobs, we can manage one job in a hundred different scenarios. Just imagine off the top of your head right now how many of those GLBDATA jobs we can consolidate.

And then the other thing that we should emphasize here is the fact that we are setting up an immediate job dependency, so that when the first job completes successfully the next job can run immediately after, assuming that all the other dependencies are also satisfied. So again, there’s no more delays here. We’re not job watching anymore. And this was one of the major ways that University of Mary Washington did save time.

Now, that being said, I did want to note, I know we are emphasizing the Banner space right now, but JAMS can handle jobs of all types. So if you imagine and actual ISIR load process, it goes a little bit more beyond just the individual Banner job itself. Maybe you want to kick off an Oracle query after you update a POPSEL. We can have JAMS do that in between one of your Banner jobs. Or maybe you’re utilizing the TDClient to gather those inbound files to begin with and you want JAMS to run that before a Banner job that requires them. You can absolutely do that as well.

So, after we run the sequence itself and we’re looking at the actual output for our RCRTP 18 job, we can see here that JAMS captures that log and list output, the way that we configured earlier. And JAMS also allows us to do some regular expression pattern finding.

Now this is commonly overlooked and, actually, it’s very important and it’s a big time saver, and I’ll tell you why. So JAMS capturing that output information for us allows us to keep that information in a central location, to review the Banner output. It saves a ton of time from having the end users gather that information from all the different file systems in play.

And the other benefit here is that JAMS has the ability to validate any discrepancies in our reporting output. So as an example, we have JAMS going through and checking our Banner report after it’s completed running, to make sure that the total number of people processed is not anything contradictory to what we are expecting. And this is actually one of the other ways that University of Mary Washington is leveraging JAMS to save some time.

And we do have a couple other features that we’d like to talk about. So now talking about the actual scheduling features of JAMS. So JAMS can run jobs on a static schedule or, more importantly now, we have different ways to kick things off more dynamically. So through event driven scenarios. And as these users go through and configure their jobs, JAMS will also audit the changes that are made.

And this matters because as you probably already guessed at this point, this is a huge time saver. So, some of our scheduling options include having a job run based on a file, or maybe having a job based on an email. So just imagine being able to finally retire your file hunting hat because JAMS is doing that work for you.

Now the other thing is that JAMS will tell you who made changes, why they made those changes, and when those changes occurred. So this allows for less of those emails going back and forth between users and for more productivity. And the information is readily available there. So if we need to generate an audit report, we can very easily do that.

Some other options that you should be able to do is configure when jobs run, and to be able to see those schedules at a glance. And for that JAMS provides unique scheduling requirements. Options such as providing a custom calendar, or even an amazing projected schedule view. So we know that all organizations run with specific date requirements, and there’s nothing worse than spending hours chasing down an issue because a job ran on the wrong company holiday. Well the custom calendars in JAMS will allow users to schedule jobs on and around those dates, through a centralized calendar view. So a quick change to this calendar can actually resolve hours of suffering down the line.

And the other benefit comes from that projected schedule view. So now we have no more surprises in our environment. So are you not sure when a job is going to kick off? Well, project the schedule. Do you want to make sure that a process can start at the upcoming semester? Go ahead and project the schedule. So we really use that tool to give insight to all of the users, so that way they can validate those environmental schedules days, weeks, months in advance. And that way, again, there are no surprises.

So as we’ve discussed just a couple of different ways that we can go through JAMS and very quickly import those Banner jobs with those configuration parameters. Use the dynamic parameter options to save user input time. We also have the ability to link our jobs together to create those optimized workflows. And that way those jobs run in a dependent order, and again, saving some time. We don’t have to wait in between each of those jobs in order for the next job to kick off.

Then JAMS does us a real big favor. It validates our output for us, so you don’t have to go through, and you don’t have to wait for jobs to complete and then check all the output information. We’ll have JAMS go through and intelligently do that for us. And then moving through, we have the options to schedule JAMS more dynamically, so no more of those static schedules.

So, we may need to have a job kickoff at eight o’clock on any given day, but what if we don’t know what day a file is going to come in, but we still need JAMS to kick off those jobs? We have those options now. And thankfully for all our end users they can hang, again, those file watching hats because JAMS will take care of that work for them.

And then JAMS, lastly, will automatically store our audit information for those tracking purposes. So that way we have all the provided insight that we need, and collectively these are all the different ways that University of Mary Washington was able to consolidate down the time it takes to run their Banner processes. All right, Cody, thank you.

Fantastic. Thank you Louis. This has been really informative so far. And thank you everybody for your questions that have come through so far. We’re going to take some time here to go through as many of those as we can. And I want to apologize in advance for paraphrasing any of your questions. Of course, if anything comes to mind, please feel free, go ahead and post it over on that chat window on the right hand side of your screen.

So, the first one that I have here, I will take myself, Louis. It’s from a bit earlier in the webinar. Do you have an example of JAMS automating outside of Banner?

We actually did a case study with the University of Virginia Health System using JAMS for non-Banner automation. They’re automating hundreds of SQL jobs and workflows every day. And those jobs are actually pulling data that correspond to patient care. So patient and hospital data is up to date. And it ensures that the admissions and the treatment are going the way they should be.

So, there, Scott Carter is the DBA there. He did that case study with us and gave us some really good information on how they used JAMS for non-Banner processes. If you’re interested, I can send out a copy of that to you as well.

All right, the next one that I have here for you Louis, “We use TDClient to pull in government files. Does JAMS automate TDClient?” I think you already answered this, but could you go back over it?

Yeah, yeah, no problem. It really comes down to the way you’re currently kicking off those TDClient processes. And typically it’s through a Linux or Unix batch job. And JAMS has the ability to kick off any of those shell scripts on any of those systems. And then, like I mentioned earlier, we can then take that individual job and then put that in our overall sequence for the workflow.

Great. And I’ve got another one along the same lines, “Can JAMS query against Oracle?”

Yeah. So some of the other methods that JAMS includes is the ability to kick off an Oracle Stored Procedure, or any of the PL SQL Oracle jobs that you might have. And we also do have an integration connector for the Oracle eBusiness Suite option. So, we have Oracle covered.

Great. The next one I have here, I’m actually going to combine two of these. So, we have one person asking what configuring parameters looks like. And another asking if end users can easily make changes to jobs, like schedules and parameters. I know this might be a surprise thing. Could you take a minute and open up the JAMS client and show them that?

Yeah, sure. Just give me a couple of seconds here to pull JAMS up, and then we can even go through creating the RCRTP 18 job that we were just looking at.

So you should be able to see JAMS now. And I’m in my folder structure, and I’m in the location where I’d like to create the job. So as the end user, all I have to do is right click add a job, following the guides that we outlined before. Let’s just give that job the RCRTP 18 name.

We have our execution method selected. And then we can go straight into editing that job. So the first step being the Banner connection, well I want to kick this off in BanTest and I can choose the Banner job. So you see the full dropdown list of jobs. And we’ll start filtering through. So I want to get to my RCRTP 18 job, and I can select it. Next up is choosing the Banner user that we’d like to run the job as, and then we’d go through that parameter set options.

So, this is kind of getting to the question now. So I’m going to populate from the job level default, and then navigate over to my parameters tab to see those arguments pulled in. And from there we can start configuring these jobs to receive values from a query, from a database, or like I mentioned before, those, those dynamic date values, or even pulling in file names to pass into these arguments here.

And as far as the user going through and the ease of use for changing it, we have the ability to go through and modify any of these values at any given time. So as long as the JAMS administrators provide those end users with the right permissions, any user can go in and make those changes.

Great. Lots of drop-downs, and lots of auto-populating lists there. I like to see that. All right, so that is all of the questions that we have here that really fall under the normal scope of this webinar.

We have a couple that were outside the scope, a little bit more technical, so we will get to those questions right after this webinar is over, if we didn’t get to you yet.

Thank you again Louis. This has been really informative. And thank you all again for joining us today. If you want more info on how to automate Banner in your environment, I really encourage you to get in touch with our team.

And if you’re new to JAMS, remember you can start a trial at any time by downloading the latest version right from our main site. And that download is going to give you everything that you need to get up and running. That includes ways to contact our rock star support team members, like Louis, and links to training materials. So thank you all again for joining us and have a great day. Thank you, Louis.

Thank you, Cody.