February 14, 2005, 2:02 PM —
 Strategy in Practice |
| The challenge |
| The solution |
| What to look for |
| What to avoid |
| Questions you must ask |
| Are you a candidate? |
This Best Practices is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.
Company:
Air Products
Air Products serves customers in the technology, energy, healthcare and industrial markets worldwide with a unique portfolio of products, services and solutions, providing atmospheric gases, process and specialty gases, performance materials and chemical intermediates. Founded in 1940, Air Products has built leading positions in key growth markets such as semiconductor materials, refinery hydrogen, home healthcare services, natural gas liquefaction, and advanced coatings and adhesives. The company is recognized for its innovative culture, operational excellence and commitment to safety and the environment, and is listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability and FTSE4Good Indices. The company has annual revenues of $7.4 billion, operations in over 30 countries, and nearly 20,000 employees around the globe.
Challenge:
Air Products was looking to move from an IT environment that was mainframe-centric to one that leveraged distributed computing. In addition, they needed a single point of control to achieve a more centralized, efficient support system for the 75,000 jobs that Air Products handled each month across a range of IT systems and platforms. The company needed a job scheduler with a single operations team, which would allow them to easily integrate new IT solutions into the existing environment without needing to add personnel or undergo extensive training. Most importantly, Air Products needed a scalable job scheduler that would allow the company to grow.
Solution:
Since its initial installation of job scheduling software from UC4, Air Products has continued to grow at a rapid pace. In just four years, the number of jobs it handles has jumped to more than 400,000 per month. The company
