We have several SAP systems such as IBP, S4HANA, SolMan, etc. By implementing Helix Control-M, we wanted a tool that monitors different activities on these platforms and launches jobs.

Each company has a different number of jobs. We have thousands of jobs, but we have selected the most critical jobs of the company that normally run in the early morning. We wanted a platform that allows us to launch the job, for example, from point A until it finishes, and then there is also the possibility of being able to launch another job from another tool, which could be a SaaS tool, such as IBP so that several jobs can be executed and finished in parallel. If there is a failure in the system, we send an email, and for much more important things, generate a ticket in a tool called SolMan so that the support team can attend to the case that has arisen due to the failure of a job.

All those human errors that we were facing did not occur again. All these processes are critical for the company. We have implemented 22 processes. One of the processes starts at eleven at night. The process runs in S4HANA. It sends data to IBP, and IBP makes an optimizer and then it becomes a request that specifies the national transfers of the products that are going to be distributed. In other words, these are requests that indicate how many products should be sent from one point to another point for the customer at a national level. At six in the morning, another team, which is the distribution team, waits for this request to assemble the trucks and get them ready to leave. If they do not have this request, the trucks will remain stationary. By having the trucks stopped, there is no distribution, so there can be a loss of sales. There can be a drop in stock. You accumulate inventory in the warehouse because the plant continues producing, but where are you going to put the new products? There are a series of consequences that can cause the process to fail because we did not have immediate action to create that request. This tool has helped us positively impact the company's processes. We could get its benefits immediately after the implementation.

Helix Control-M’s ability to build, schedule, manage, and monitor application and data workflows in production is good. When we went live and throughout the first stage of the project, I thought it was great because we received full support. Now that we have the tool live, I have presented more cases, and I feel that they are a little slower. I have to try harder to get their attention.

Helix Control-M has affected our ability to orchestrate data pipelines in production. It has been a great benefit. Little by little, users' trust is increasing. When there is just one small failure, they usually stop believing in the tool. With a more solid tool like this, we have fewer errors, which means more trust of the users.

Helix Control-M has given our company’s business users visibility and control over their jobs and freed up IT personnel for other tasks. It has freed us up a lot because previously, IT used to coordinate meetings with the company that gave us the manual service. We had to meet and discuss failures and issues, but we no longer have these meetings because that third-party company is no longer there. We replaced them with this solution, and it has freed up a few hours. Being able to free up the company's IT team is important because we have so many issues to deal with. Nowadays, technology and innovation are in full swing, and users are constantly asking for new things, so the more we focus on those things, the better.

Helix Control-M has affected collaboration between IT and our business users. Previously, our business users only complained about process failures, and now they themselves can reprogram. Before Helix Control-M, we had to send emails with the reprogramming. Despite that, they did not do what we had specified in the email, so it was all a waste of time. We wasted time with the business, and we wasted time meeting with this company. In the end, they did not do what we had told them. Nowadays, the user interacts directly with the tool because they have access. They themselves can reprogram those processes. There is less need to have a meeting, and there is also a reduction in the email replies and forwards. We have reduced everything. They directly interact with the tool to launch and relaunch.

First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate.

The second valuable feature is that there have been many benefits, which we have been utilizing little by little.

The third valuable feature is that there is a good support team. They have solved things that other companies have not done. When it comes to IBP, because it is SaaS, it was not easy for our team, but we received good support. At first, there were also issues regarding the functionality of SolMan. We saw that it was not going to work, so we did not go live with that, but they told us that there was going to be a new version where the ticket would be generated almost automatically. Because they were releasing a technical issue that would allow us to generate a job automatically and generate a ticket in a simpler way, we waited for that upgrade to be released, and it indeed was like that. Such continuous support is very valuable because it is not a tool that does not progress. They are constantly releasing things and allowing it to grow and cover more functionalities.

There can be an improvement in the area of finance.

I contacted the BMC team here in Lima and mentioned the things that can be improved. For example, S4HANA jobs are something with which BMC has already worked in several companies. Whenever I pull an S4HANA job to the Helix Control-M tool, it pulls it naturally with all the steps. A job can have several steps, and in this case, it is very easy to control the steps taken. However, in the case of the SaaS IBP tool, it can pull the job but cannot identify the steps. So, when I want to take an action in a step, I have to split the job. We are having to work longer because we have to split the jobs from, for example, 52 steps to 12, depending on where I want it to have an action. We would like the tool to be able to identify the steps so that we are not continually splitting them as it generates more executions for me.

The other improvement is that in, for example, S4HANA jobs, when the job fails, you have the status of the job. It recognizes them perfectly. In the case of IBP, it also has status but at a more minimal level. Sometimes the step fails, but the job does not fail. It ends with an error in a step without identifying it for me.

Another thing that we have asked to improve is that Helix Control-M can be integrated with more tools such as Odoo. Odoo is a tool for all these companies that are not with SAP. They use it as a small ERP to generate their sales. Odoo integration will help us receive inventory reports.

The communication and details related to the upgrades that are going to be happening also need improvement.

The implementation began in 2021 and went live in February 2022.

It is a powerful, stable tool.

I have had a very good impression. I have been to the events where BMC shows its new products. I see that there are more things that are going to help a lot. We will be able to get much more out of it.

Alicorp is at several locations and in several countries. These processes have only been launched here in Lima, Peru. They have been divided into the demand planning, distribution, production, and supply areas by the planning team, but it is only done by a team here in Lima. The result is at the national level, but the configuration made in the system is only done in Lima, Peru. Later, we will surely also move internationally.

We started with a small planning team that is gaining confidence in the tool, and the next stage is to cover more areas of the business because currently, it is a small group with a small number of processes being executed. The idea is to make a massive change in the other areas as well, such as the finance department, and then the analytics department. This requires us to look at this implementation from various angles, so we can optimize the dissemination and execute it massively. Before taking that step, we wanted to be in a solid position with the team that is working on Helix Control-M. We wanted to have confidence in what the tool does, and now that we reached that step, the next step is greater use.

Our first-level support is with the GrupoCONTEXT team. They have the knowledge for all cases. There have only been 2 or 3 times where they did not know about the issue and involved BMC. There have only been 3 complex events. There have not been more complex issues. Normally, there are problems when maintenance and upgrades are carried out because sometimes the system changes.

Positive

We previously executed this process manually. It was a third-party company that had 9 people in the early hours. They manually launched one job and then relaunched the other according to a document that we gave them. The document said what things should be done depending on the case that arose. The problem was that there was a lot of shift rotation. For example, if one job ended at 2:00 a.m., in theory, the other should start at 2:01 a.m., but it started at 2:10 or 2:20 a.m. It took 20 to 30 minutes. This time was wasted because the person was not there all the time monitoring. They either made a mistake in launching another job that was not the one we had indicated, or they simply did not launch, which was much worse. So, because of the shift rotation of people, since they were early morning jobs, we constantly had those problems. We had a loss of time, no precision, and a lot of human error.

I was involved in the process of evaluation and implementation, and now, I am also involved in monitoring the development.

Its implementation is among the simplest I have done. SAP tools are more complex. Helix Control-M was live within a short time. We configured it in 2-3 days. We tested it one day, and the next day, it could go live with a process right away.

Our implementation strategy was to divide the implementation into stages. We did it by area and configured the jobs. That was it. We had workshops to understand what the user wanted, and then we did configuration in the test environment to see that what they requested is actually what is being done and executed in that environment. We then moved that to production, so for each user group, we followed: demand, distribution, supply, and production. It was super simple.

In terms of maintenance, from time to time, they notify us that there are upgrades. We receive notifications about agent upgrades, tool upgrades, and some system maintenance. Because it is a SaaS, they tell us everything. We coordinate internally so that if there is a process that is running at that moment, that program is executed manually.

For the server and agent part, we have outsourced the maintenance to the CJG company. They are in charge of doing that maintenance. On the operations side, there is a person in charge. Every time something happens, he is in charge of the event.

For the integration, we received assistance from GrupoCONTEXT. They were in charge of doing all the configuration and programming.

From GrupoCONTEXT, there were two people with constant support from BMC. On our side, there was an architect and a few other people. All the suppliers were contacted so that they were present during configurations, integrations, and testing.

We have seen an ROI. In theory, this third year, we will recover what we invested. It has helped us replace the cost of human resources.

For this tool, as we made the three-year contract, the cost of the licenses is maintained. If we had to hire people for this work, we would have had to increase their salaries every year.

They are expensive. If we were a small company, it would be complicated because we have to have strong sales and operations to be able to afford a tool of this level. Being a large company, the cost-benefit is covered, but it is not within the level of cheap solutions.

The dilemma for us was whether it is worth paying for a monitoring tool or whether it is better to pay people for the work. Helix Control-M was more beneficial because we had problems with manual monitoring, and these problems were expensive.

I was in charge of evaluating all the tools. Because we already had SAP, I first evaluated the SAP tools, such as SAP PI/PO and SolMan. All the SAP tools do these functions. They do them well, but they have limitations. For example, in SolMan, you can monitor and do all the operations, but when it comes to IBP, which is SaaS, it does not work. It is better to not manipulate the programming settings. It is better to leave the standard programming settings because it is simpler.

I was also told to evaluate external tools, so I evaluated Helix Control-M and the IBM solution. Helix Control-M won there. It is the first time that we have used a tool for this type of control. Previously, this work was done manually by a team of people. We used the tools only when monitoring a single platform. For example, for S4HANA, we only used SolMan, but we wanted to integrate several systems and find a solution that does all the activities efficiently and safely.

I would advise you to challenge it. We made an assessment to challenge it to see that it covers all of our use cases and we can trust it. It is a solid tool. Go for it if you can afford it.

The most important lesson that I have learned from using this solution is to not be afraid of automation. Sometimes, because you have been working manually for many years, migrating everything to automatic processes is risky, but I learned to not be afraid of doing this.

In terms of the measurable business impact of Helix Control-M, we are working on that. I just had a meeting with the commercial team on the subject of the month-closing report process. Currently, the month closing process is 5 days, and they want to reduce it to 3, for example. What they have told me is that if orchestrated right, Helix Control-M could help reduce the process time. We are in the middle of the evaluation process to precisely take care of its business impacts. With the finance department, we are evaluating the possibility of reducing time.

Overall, I would rate Helix Control-M a 9 out of 10.

Control-M is a job scheduler. You can schedule FTP jobs or use scripts within Control-M. You can also execute commands when necessary to schedule, or you can just run a script that is hosted on a server. Based on the schedule, you can orchestrate or automate jobs. You can set dependencies between jobs. You can correlate and create a sequence of your jobs and execute them in the order you wish. You can set the variables and options that you like. You can set the prerequisites and post-job activities after the completion, such as reports analysis, emails, etc.

Helix Control-M is critical for us. If we do not have a job scheduler like this, we will have to have people running 366 different jobs on a daily basis and 24 hours a day. These are the jobs that we run from midnight to midnight every single day on a scheduled basis.

I do not use Helix Control-M's Python client or Airflow. I am using the web client. I do not create jobs. I give my users access to create their own jobs. I just maintain the agents and keep the administration going. When they have questions, they come up to me and ask. We just use the web interface to go into the planning mode and create our jobs, folders, dependencies, etc.

Control-M has helped to give business users visibility and control over their jobs. Both Control-M and Helix Control-M allow me to give users control over their own set of jobs. They can log in and orchestrate their jobs as they want. They can also troubleshoot them on their own. It makes that easy. I just have to be hands-off and stand by in case they need assistance, but once the tool is deployed and every agent is up and running, it is easy. The people who have the jobs running or the job scheduled know about their own jobs. They know their own demands. They have control over the decision of when they are going to run it and how they are going to run it. It makes it very simple, and it helps.

You can set up your users and define whether they have admin privileges or they can just affect a set of jobs.

The fact that it is all centralized in the web browser makes it easily accessible from everywhere. All my users are IT people. They do different things. They do databases. They do informatics. They do development and things of that nature. To business users, such as board members of the company, we can give them reports on, for example, how the business closed and how much profits were there, or if all the transactions were submitted to the bank on time. If not, what were they missing? We can provide all things of that nature. We can pull it all up in a report and then schedule it on a daily basis or weekly basis. It is simple.

There have been cost savings with Helix Control-M. The license that the company was paying for Control-M, including support, was three grand more expensive than Helix Control-M. With Control-M, we also had to have an administrator dedicated to maintaining Control-M on-premises. That cost of having a person dedicated to doing just Control-M jobs is gone after we moved to the cloud. We are not only getting more money in savings; we are also making a better distribution and use of our time. By not having a dedicated person, we are saving a couple of grand. We are saving on the license and, of course, resources. We do not have to have dedicated resources such as servers. We do it virtually. We do not need to have resources reserved for the server and database. I just have to deploy the agent, which can run multiple instances in my cluster. They can share resources, which is another saving there.

In Helix Control-M, we have the automation API that allows us to customize and do integrations easily in any script, such as Java or Python. It is all integrated within the integration API.

Every year, they add another set of automation or compatibility with different applications. They are capable of integrating with Informatica, AWS, etc. You can schedule queries directly from Control-M on databases without having a server or agent. You can do scan jobs or queries directly. Every other month, they are doing releases, and they have tons of new integrations, which makes it compatible with more and more applications around the cloud.

They have a department that handles requests for enhancements. I talked to Control-M guys back in October or November when they had a gathering here in Atlanta. We talked about not being able to go back in history in Helix Control-M for more than two weeks. We submitted a request for enhancement. They told us that they are working on it, and they are thinking of expanding that to 30 days. We would like to see it expand to 90 days, but they are working on it. In Control-M, we were able to go back 180 days, but that was on-prem. The storage of that data was on our own servers. We know that storage is money, and we do not expect them to store that much of the data, but at least 30 to 60 days seem proper.

Community Loans of America has been using Control-M since version 6. It has been at least 10 years.

I have not had any downtime with Helix Control-M. All the upgrades are scheduled, and they give us a time window when they think they are going to schedule them, and we adjust. I have not seen anybody notice it. The jobs get held before the update, and they start automatically after the update. If anybody noticed it, that was because I had to tell them that a maintenance window was coming up and to be aware of it.

I contacted their support a couple of times to ask them about an error that I did not understand. They have three guys who are pretty handy. When you ask questions, you, of course, have to wait at least 24 hours for someone to respond. They are pretty fast. Most of my queries were responded to within the same day, which is great. I would, for sure, rate their support a solid 10 out of 10.

Positive

We were just using Control-M. We did not have any other scheduler. We migrated from Control-M to Helix Control-M. 

Control-M is on-premises, and it requires a dedicated administrator. Control-M has three major pieces. It has a Control-M server. It has a main agent, and it has a database. If you have HA, you will have the same things at a secondary location, so you will have to manage the cluster and make sure that all the pieces are working together. If, for some reason, one side fails, HA tries to recover in the second location. The management or the administration side of things is a challenge. It requires a dedicated person. Our main Control-M guy left us six years ago. Every time we had an issue with Control-M, it took us three or four hours to put it back where it should be. By migrating to Helix Control-M, our biggest success was getting away from the administration. Having Helix Control-M, which is a cloud product, allows us to use all the advantages of the job scheduler without handling the administration of our own servers.

If I compare Helix Control-M with what I had to do on Control-M on-prem, the process is very similar. The calendar has changed though. There was an advantage with Control-M that you could specify when was your new day load. Our new day load was every day at 9 AM in the morning. With Helix Control-M, we have to have only midnight as a new load because of the change of the date. It was a big challenge because we had to reorchestrate all the jobs to suit the new day load being moved from 9 AM to midnight. 

Essentially, scheduling a job or creating a new job requires the same effort in both applications. The advantage of Helix Control-M is that I do not depend on a single agent to pull FTP profiles. All of them are centralized. It does not matter which agent I am using. I have access to the whole list. In Control-M, FTP profiles had to be added to the agents that were being used. Helix Control-M has made it easy to orchestrate data pipelines in production because now, I do not have to worry about the whole backend of Control-M. I am sure that it is up to date, and I can log in reliably, load jobs, and orchestrate them as I need.

I once tried to migrate Control-M to something else called RunMyJobs. Compared to RunMyJobs, I would definitely go for Helix Control-M.

In terms of our environment, we are a mixed shop. The majority of our products are on-prem. We have a Nutanix cluster in our data center, and that is where we host the majority of our things. We have maybe one or two devices on AWS. For Azure, I know that we have a license because it comes with our enterprise Microsoft 365 license, but I do not recall having any hosting there.

For migration, they have a migration tool that makes it very easy. You can run this migration tool, and it will export all your current jobs in a JSON file. It will try to import them on the tenant in the cloud on Helix Control-M. We faced a few challenges here and there because at the time we did it, some features were missing in Helix Control-M or were not supported, but they were supported in Control-M. We used to have dual endpoint profiles for the MSP file transfer or the ASP. FTP jobs have profiles where the server address, user password, or key gets stored. In Control-M, you could have a single profile with two endpoints. You could have Host A and Host B in a single profile. That was not supported with Helix Control-M at the time we decided to migrate, so we had the challenge of converting all those dual endpoint profiles into single endpoint profiles to be able to be imported. I know for a fact now that it is no longer an issue because they now allow you to create dual endpoint profiles in Helix Control-M, but it was a challenge at the time.

Fixing things here and there and making it compatible took about six months. Those six months were not just because of how hard it was to migrate. It was a combination of the challenges of migration and other tasks that we have not been doing because we could not afford to have a person dedicated entirely only to Control-M. Effectively, the time dedicated exclusively to the migration was two and a half months, but the migration was distributed in a six-month calendar because of other duties and tasks that I had to perform.

We got help from VPMA. VPMA is our reseller. We purchased a license of Control-M through VPMA, and they have support and all that. We get help from them. They helped us to run the Orchestrator or the migration tool from BMC. They told us where the odd points were, and then we went to do it on our own. We came back and reviewed them again and kept fixing them.

Overall, we had three people. We had one person from VPMA, and then there was me and one of my technicians to assist me.

It is not bad. The company can afford it, and it pays for itself. We have those jobs running automatically.

I would rate Helix Control-M a 10 out of 10. I like Helix Control-M.