Tidal's Enterprise Scheduler Provides Staples with Cost-Effective Automation and Centralization

The benefits from modernizing Staples’ enterprise job scheduling environment are expected to be rapid and significant. One area of dramatic cost reduction will be the elimination of 12 costly legacy scheduling applications, each burdened with everincreasing license fees. Another striking cost reduction area is labor. Labor efficiencies will grow via Tidal™ Enterprise Scheduler, which allows for greater visibility and simplification of job management and administration. Furthermore, the centralization of batch management responsibilities will allow Staples’ development resources to focus on higher value-add tasks, such as delivering improved business application solutions. The initial 3-year financial impact of deploying Tidal’s solution is expected to reach an internal rate of return (IRR) of 61% and a return on investment (ROI) of 45%, with $1.1 Million in expected net benefits and a payback period of only 15 months.
THE CHALLENGE:
In some ways, Staples faces challenges of its own success. Starting with the first superstore opened in 1986 near Boston, MA, Staples has grown its multi-channel, global business swiftly and surely, to maintain its leadership in the office products market and achieve $27 Billion dollars in sales. The company’s IT capabilities are core to the company’s success. IT helps enable delivery of the brand promise, namely the customer experience and perception, “that was easy.” Staples’ continuous, significant, and rapid growth trajectory creates an enormous challenge for IT to manage this growth and sustain the brand measure of excellence. Accordingly, in 2007, Staples commenced an end-to-end modernization of its IT infrastructure. A critical area for the redesign was the enterprise batch management architecture and associated processes. The existing environment presented a myriad of opportunities to lower costs and inefficiencies associated with developing, executing, and managing batch jobs. In the legacy systems: n Script management was decentralized, burdening, and duplicating the focus of multiple development groups, reducing their investment in critical activities such as business requirements definition, application development, testing, etc.
- Rogue scheduling such as CRON and other 3rd party tools created stability challenges.
- Legacy tools required software to be loaded on each and every server creating significant maintenance and support requirements.
- Legacy tool application fees were substantial and uncapped, leading to further increases with future business growth.
- Error detection and processing were cumbersome requiring manual debugging to pinpoint where each error occurred.
Given these challenges, a small team of IT operations experts was tasked with reinventing batch management and creating a flexible, efficient system to support business growth without forfeiting brand standards.
THE SOLUTION – CENTRALIZING ENTERPRISE JOB SCHEDULING WITH TIDAL:
To meet this objective, Staples made the strategic decision to completely overhaul the resources, processes, and systems comprising the enterprise job scheduling function. A core theme of this overhaul was centralization. Staples wanted to consolidate and integrate all backoffice batch processes to create greater consistency, visibility, and scalability of overnight batch systems operations.
The first step was to create a small, highpowered corporate team with experience in managing enterprise job scheduling for the entire company. This enterprise job scheduling team audited the numerous systems environments running across Staples and identified over 12 legacy scheduling applications. The team then diligently researched the leading enterprise job scheduling solutions on the market, creating a shortlist of two solutions: Tidal and a leading competitor. After performing a rigorous proof-of-concept test from September through November last year to closely evaluate the two contenders, the business was awarded to Tidal. Tidal™ Enterprise Scheduler was selected because it demonstrated several key advantages:
- Greater installation simplicity – much like Staples’ own “make it easy” brand.
- Lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
- Excellent customer service demonstrated during the proof-of-concept.
- Conformity to SOX and compliance related requirements.