REGION: Europe
INDUSTRY: Retail / Travel
SOLUTION: Workload
Automation
3,600 travel agencies rely
on timely processing to
keep over 163,000 hotel
beds in 28 countries filled
• Batch processes update prices and availability of flights, hotels, and all-inclusive trips every 15 minutes
• Migration of three schedulers to one centralized workload automation platform
• More than 4,000 automated jobs each day without manual intervention
TUI AG is one of Europe’s largest travel firms
operating more than 3,600 travel agencies, more
than 100 aircraft, and around 300 hotels with 163,000
beds in 28 countries. In addition, 12,000 corporate
travel agencies under TUI serve business customers
in approximately 80 countries.
Business Challenge
These statistics hint at the volume of information
that TUI must process reliably and just-in-time.
‘TUI InfoTec’ is an internal IT service provider that
assumes sole responsibility for all of the company’s
major batch processes. These jobs involve tasks like
nightly backups of the central mainframe travelbooking system as well as subsequent reorganization
of the DB2 database. Processing of data collected
online during the previous day is the next step.
Not all batch jobs wait for night to fall: timely
processing is also needed during regular office
hours. More than 3,500 jobs are generated in these
hours, dealing especially with the central booking
system that was controlled by CA-7. Analyses aided
by the TUI data warehouses (NT and Unix systems)
also depend on regularly updated data stores. The
necessary data selections and replications have been
running since 2001 through Automic ONE Automation, which handles about 1,000 jobs.
The data warehouse at TUI was supplied through
the Tivoli Workload Scheduler (about 1,000 jobs)
and had the same requirements. “For years, TUI
employed three different job scheduling tools in
parallel and used them to control the individual
procedures,” explains Wolfgang Utesch, Director of
Production Planning at TUI InfoTec. “Each scheduler was assigned to certain system platforms and
applications. What all batch jobs had in common was
their high level of relevance for the company’s operations. For this reason, there was a desire to control
and monitor all applications and systems from just a
single centralized point. This approach would eliminate many potential operational risks. In the final
analysis, availability and security are decisive.”
The Solution
ONE Automation proved to be very well suited to
TUI’s needs. One criterion was the ability to support
all platforms. However, the high availability concept
and disaster recovery features of the ONE Automation platform were of critical importance for complete
migration of the job controller, because interruption
of important processing could not be tolerated. The
ONE Automation database server and all data were
mirrored in two separate computing centers. All
processes run in parallel on several clustered servers.
This allows for flexible scaling of the ONE
Automation installation. Yet another requirement of
the platform was to smoothly migrate old jobs into
the new environment. Automic offers the tools necessary for migrating all current job scheduling systems
to ONE Automation. This automates and acceler-
“The success of TUI depends a great deal on the
reliability of its background processing. With ONE Automation we are playing it safe, since this product provides the
much-celebrated single point of control”
Wolgang Utesch, Director of Production Planning
ates the conversion. According to Wolfgang Utesch,
“Automic provided a very professional support
during the entire migration.”
Some of the processes demonstrate how important
job scheduling is at TUI AG: Batch processes handle
printing and sending of travel documents from the
online booking system. These peripherals to the core
application are highly relevant for the company’s
profitability and also directly influence customer
satisfaction. But, if a customer books a last-minute
trip and plans to depart soon, a ONE Automation
batch will perform the updated processing and
immediately execute abbreviated production of the
travel documents (‘flexible ticket printing’).
Employees at the travel agencies and airports also
depend on timely execution of batch jobs in other
ways. For instance, batch processes update prices
and availability of flights, hotels and all-inclusive
trips every 15 minutes. The rapid cyclical processing makes them almost like online data without
negatively affecting the system’s performance.
Wolfgang Utesch continues: “For the future, we plan
further international consolidation of IT resources
so that job and production volume will continue to
rise. Booking systems at acquired tour operators are
always a core element of competition, so these are
largely preserved. But in the future their production
will also take place through the ONE Automatio
platform.” When this happens, ONE Automation’s
time-zone support will be a good match for TUI’s
needs.
“What all batch jobs had
in common was their high
level of relevance to the
company’s operations. For
this reason, there was a
desire to control and
monitor all applications
and systems from just a
single centralized point.”
Wolgang Utesch
Director of Production Planning
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