UC4 Software today announced that Syracuse Post-Standard, the largest news gathering organization in Central New York, has recently implemented its job scheduling software. The Post-Standard is using the UC4 solution to automate more than 500 jobs each week related to the newspaper's circulation activities.
With more than 400,000 readers throughout the Syracuse area, the Post-Standard embraced technology long ago to support its various circulation processes, using a UNIX-based HP-9000 system coupled with a job scheduling solution from Tidal Software to manage billing, handle circulation routing, and print bundle labels. But in 2002, the newspaper discovered that the job scheduler it had been using was being discontinued. Initially, the Post-Standard sought to upgrade to a more current version of Tidal's job scheduling software - but found itself dissatisfied with the company and its product.
Instead, the Post-Standard's Information Services team, charged with the task of finding a new product, turned to UC4. According to IS Operations Manager Keith Nave, UC4 was a better fit for the Post-Standard's needs, offering a comprehensive feature set and a competitive price - complemented by an outstanding sales and support team.
"We considered upgrading to a newer solution from Tidal, but found that no product or team offered us the comfort level we had with UC4. The product is extremely flexible, and the company was incredibly responsive to our needs," he explained. "Our own team, which also included Judy Walberger and Eric Heuschneider, worked closely with the UC4 staff to make the transition a seamless one. We built all the jobs and laid out the various job plans with any needed dependencies. Before finalizing each job plan, we were able to run forecasts based on different conditions to ensure all jobs would run as expected. After two months of intensive testing, the actual go-live process took a mere 15 minutes!"
Today, UC4 is successfully automating hundreds of circulation jobs for the Post-Standard each week. The product's drag-and-drop, Windows-type functionality has made it easier to create jobs and job plans. UC4 also provides the Post-Standard with fast access to extensive job histories and statistics, enabling Nave and his team to simply click to obtain detailed information about current activities and progress.
Nave is now looking for new ways to use UC4 to further enhance the Post-Standard's circulation process, such as accessing the online documentation created for and linked to each job, and setting up a paging system to enable critical alerts for specific processes. The Post-Standard is also exploring the possibility of implementing UC4 to monitor jobs and processes on other systems at the newspaper's plant.
UC4 is a platform-independent solution for the enterprise-wide planning, management, and monitoring of all processes and events in heterogeneous IT environments. The first European SAP-certified job scheduling solution, UC4 supports all commonly used operating systems, including Windows 98/NT/2000/XP, z/OS, BS 2000, VMS, Tandem, OS/400, MPE, UNIX, as well as all leading ERP applications such as mySAP, SAP Business Intelligence, PeopleSoft, and Oracle Applications. UC4 can be integrated into frameworks such as HP OpenView, BMC Patrol, and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console.
UC4:global is the job scheduling solution of choice for international companies. To support the requirements of global enterprises, the system offers expanded features including multiple time zone and native language support, a global dialog functionality, and complete synchronization for coordinating globally distributed systems.
UC4 Software (now part of CA Technologies) helps companies integrate job scheduling and event automation across global, multi-platform IT environments.