June 06, 2007, 9:53 AM — Business Need
Increase IT efficiency and productivity through automation, thereby enabling the staff to support rapid growth, including an increasing volume of data, an expanding customer base, and the need for a larger, more complex IT infrastructure
Solutions
BSM solutions from BMC Software help CARFAX automate batch scheduling, gain insight into the impact of batch business process issues, establish and meet customer service level agreements, and monitor servers to detect problems
Results
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"I'd estimate that without the BMC solutions, our group would have needed to grow from four people to 20. Now, we've been able to reassign some of the original four to other areas of IT, enabling them to broaden their skills and increase their value to CARFAX." -- Robert Stinnett Senior Analyst CARFAX, Inc. |
In Detail:
Car buyers are becoming increasingly savvy, particularly when it comes to selecting used vehicles. Global marketing information firm J. D. Power and Associates estimates that more than half of all used-vehicle buyers use the Internet as part of their shopping process. With millions of visitors each month, www.carfax.com is one of the top five Web sites on which consumers rely for vehicle information. Moreover, thousands of auto dealers, major auto classifieds Web sites, and even banks and finance companies subscribe to CARFAX to increase their effectiveness in pricing, selling, and financing used vehicles.
Today, the CARFAX, Inc. database contains nearly five billion vehicle history records gathered from more than 20,000 data sources, including all departments of motor vehicles (DMVs) in the United States and Canada, as well as many vehicle inspection stations, auto auctions, fleet management and rental agencies, automobile manufacturers, and fire and police departments. CARFAX depends on its IT organization to provide a reliable, high-performance infrastructure to support the huge volume of constantly changing data and meet customer expectations for immediate delivery of vehicle information.
One of the IT organization's keys to success in addressing these business needs is the adoption of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) best practices and the implementation of Business Service Management (BSM) solutions from BMC Software. BMC solutions are helping the IT staff automate cross-platform batch scheduling, assess the impact of batch business processes on service delivery, establish and meet customer service level agreements, and monitor systems to detect resource issues that might disrupt business services.
Enhancing the batch environment
Ensuring the timely completion of batch jobs is critical to meeting the needs of CARFAX customers. Batch jobs keep vehicle histories current by incorporating new information gleaned from multiple sources. Batch jobs are also vital to servicing major customers who submit lists of vehicles for which they need to receive history reports. AutoTrader, for example, offers people who sell cars on its site the option of providing a CARFAX vehicle history report to potential buyers. This leading auto classifieds site submits the requests to CARFAX for the generation and delivery of reports.
"We used to handle this type of task by having people monitor the e-mail inbox and the FTP folder for customer requests," Stinnett recalls. "When a request arrived, they would start a job to create the reports. When the job was completed, they would return the completed reports to the customer. But the number of records and the number of requests kept growing, and we realized that the only way to continue meeting our service level agreements would be to eliminate manual tasks and create a fully automated process."
BMC® CONTROL-M and BMC® Batch Impact Manager have enabled the IT staff to achieve high levels of automation and consistently meet service level agreements (SLAs). BMC CONTROL-M monitors the company's e-mail and FTP systems for customer requests. When a file arrives, BMC CONTROL-M starts the batch job automatically. Once the job is complete, the resulting file is automatically sent to the customer. BMC Batch Impact Manager monitors the progress of each business process, watching for conditions that might cause a failure or degrade performance in a way that would jeopardize SLAs, and also alerting staff when intervention is required.
