The Challenges of Moving from Legacy Schedulers and WLA Tools (and How To Overcome Them)

We’ve recently discussed how some companies end up with a mixed bag of workload automation (WLA) tools, and the reasons this can happen. It’s all very well talking about this after the fact, but the reality is that many businesses – all too many – are caught between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new’.

The concerns about fully migrating away from old technology will be familiar to many: data integrity is paramount, downtime is an unacceptable outcome, and security can’t be compromised at any point.

Untangling years of ad-hoc automation, scripts, processes and dependencies is already a daunting task; turning that process and institutional knowledge into new ways of working that take advantage of technology is quite another. The sheer perceived complexity of this task, combined with those other concerns, are why many businesses get caught between different technologies and workflows.

With more than 50,000 employees, and as the largest operator of hotels and restaurants in the UK, Whitbread’s 1.3-million business-critical file transfers had to continue without fail each month during the company’s transition to Redwood’s RunMyJobs® scheduling. In total, Whitbread’s workload was spread across more than 800 different servers.

“Our polling services gather information from each and every one of our hotels, restaurants and coffee shops every day… It’s a very complex spiderweb of processes and dependencies,” John Fitzsimmons, Technical Program Manager at Whitbread Group PLC, says.

Worried by the pitfalls of outdated automation technology, Whitbread chose to migrate to Redwood’s RunMyJobs solution using our simplified four-step process, which includes automatically converting 90% of existing scheduling tasks.

“Our organization has an exacting process for IT transformation that involves our design authority, service integration and security teams. It demands conformity to Whitbread PMO project delivery framework and governance procedures,” Fitzsimmons explains.

Despite the scale of the operation and exacting criteria, Whitbread’s full migration took less than five months from planning through to live deployment.

“Early in the project we built, tested and migrated 1,900 scheduled business jobs away from RemoteWare and AutoSys. We finished 11 phased and grouped migrations between May and October. Since then, we’ve run almost three million jobs without a single problem or issue with RunMyJobs… We finally have our single solution.”

With 25 years’ experience, we know – and say frequently – that simplicity should be at the forefront of any scalable activity. With the Redwood RunMyJobs migration process, we lead by example. Don’t take our word for it though; instead, let’s leave you with Whitbread’s words:

“RunMyJobs changed a risky project into an opportunity for ongoing excellence.”

Now, that’s what we’re all about.

Try the world’s only cloud-based enterprise solution for job scheduling and process automation today. Get started now with a free trial of Redwood RunMyJobs scheduling. You’ll be able to use the service for 30 days with support and help from Redwood.