FEATURE/Financial Services Leader Stays In Front Through Smart Automation.

--(BUSINESS WIRE FEATURES)--

While we sleep, a quiet giant of a company in Kansas City runs 45,000 computer jobs a night, calmly and reliably. DST Systems Inc. - the largest mutual funds processor in America - does close to 40% of all North American mutual fund shareholder processing for more than 32 million mutual funds accounts, and handles over 55 million computer transactions each month.

DST has been providing specialized applications for the financial services industry for over 35 years. In DST's huge Winchester Data Center the computer operations area occupies 72,000 square feet. Processing for mutual funds, securities transfer and portfolio accounting alone is handled by two IBM 9021-982s and an Amdahl 5995-8670M. The entire Winchester Data Center supports over 72,000 terminals, offers 7.4 terabytes of DASD and provides more than 400 CICS regions.

Automation is the key

DST created its leadership standing in the financial world by exploiting automation. To ensure they could continue to accommodate growth, DST started to revamp the heart of its data center operation early in the 1990s. Replacing their old scheduling system was high on the list.

DST had two principal scheduling needs -- handling the large and complex existing workload, and handling growth. They did not want a system they would outgrow in five years.

Vice President Jack Dooley was instrumental in making the move to ESP Workload Manager. "We had hit the wall with the previous package. It no longer handled our growth, capacity or needs. For us the critical thing is being able to handle the quantity of work that we want to put through the system, and being able to keep track of it all."

Re-engineering for process improvement

Dooley's directive for conversion from the old scheduler to the new workload manager was to look at each process, figure out the best way to do it, and then do a migration over time to exploit the strengths of the product. "I don't understand why people do a straight conversion," he said. "Chances are, if it's going to work exactly like the product you already have, it's going to have all the same issues. So why change, unless there is something to gain from it?"

Redundancy out, flexibility in

DST exploited ESP Workload Manager's functional breadth and depth to minimize duplication and redundancy. By using the extensive ESP symbolic substitution function, groups that schedule the same jobs for different systems can now use a single procedure. At the same time they have gained more flexibility and reliability, and have less day-to-day maintenance to do.

Now scheduling support is consuming less time in the data center, and with less demand on resources, there have been savings. For example, they immediately got back about 500K of CSA that they could deploy elsewhere, and they can now control their whole operation within one master scheduling system.

Vicky Arnold is the systems programmer who was the key member of the ESP Workload Manager implementation team. She explained that as workload has increased, their customers have seen greater service reliability and the burden on data center staff has decreased. She remembered "During our recent year-end processing, we didn't encounter any outages with ESP. This contributed to a very successful year end."

Service is the bottom line

Dealing primarily with the financial community, and providing continuous service across four different time zones, the on-line systems are up until late at night, and need to be back up again in the early hours of the morning to allow brokers to be fully prepared for the next day's business. This forces an extremely compressed nightly batch window -- just a few hours -- in which they run tens of thousands of jobs. Arnold said "If we don't have a reliable scheduler, we're out of business."

"Implementing ESP Workload Manager along with other system enhancements has minimized the negative impact on nightly production schedules to the point where we consistently meet service levels.", added Peter Baas, Manager of JSystems.

Handling heavy demands

DST has retained its clients long-term, and attracted new ones because the DST systems are reliable and are up every day. The Mutual Fund TA2000 System is claimed by DST to be the leading automated record-keeping system in the industry. This system has great significance to DST's bottom line.

The major pluses Bob Kobby, who is systems officer for TA2000 support, has seen since migrating to their new scheduling system are increased scheduler availability and a significant decrease in schedule maintenance. It now takes a third of the time for maintaining and adjusting schedules, and some of this saved time is being used to improve JCL quality control.

Customers no longer face a two-hour outage in the middle of the day while the schedule is being built. ESP Workload Manager's continuous availability means that clients' questions and requests can be responded to at any time. Arnold said "Business-wise, it has given our clients a much better view of what our scheduler is doing at all times." And greater availability also means better service.

Even when DST's automation overhauls are complete, the quest for perfection will continue. According to Baas "Automation is a never-ending objective. Once all our base systems are fully deployed, then we will still continue to enhance our system so we can continue to service our customers as their needs change and grow."

CONTACT: Tina Rogers

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