General Fund Enterprise Business System
(GFEBS)
Control-M Workload
Automation
February 3, 2014
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
1
Richard Ransom Technical Manager
Accenture Federal Services
ARMY General Fund Enterprise Business Systems (GFEBS)
Background:
Mr. Ransom is a Technical Infrastructure Manager in Accenture's Federal Services Health and Public Service Sector.
He specializes in adapting emerging technologies and service delivery incorporating the ITIL framework and
methodologies through process engineering and continuous improvements. He has extensive industry experience in
working with clients in developing efficiencies, through planning, analyzing, and implementing various platforms in
datacenter operations, infrastructure, architecture, and providing recommendations to performance enhancements
Experience Summary
• Mr. Ransom’s experience consist of conducting technology assessments evaluating “as-is” environments and
adapting best practices and recommendations for the “to-be” platform. Identifying process improvements strategy’s
and enhancements in the business management of IT services, intelligence, and situational awareness
• He has over 20 years of experience addressing IT and emerging technologies across varying business units
• His has performed work with large organizations conducting transformation projects, consolidations, transitions, and
presentations on best practices, processes, and procedures. Studies have consisted of IT shared services,
applications and infrastructure support, and business continuity.
Education
 He holds a BS in Information Systems and Management; University of Maryland




Functional
Expertise:
IT strategy, alignment
and planning
IT governance, organization and structure
IT assessment, transformation, best practices and performance management
IT infrastructure service support and delivery
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
2
2
Army General Fund Enterprise Business Systems
GFEBS
■ GFEBS (General Fund Enterprise Business System) is a Web-enabled enterprise resource planning (ERP)
system for the United States Army; the mission is to standardizes, streamline and share critical data across
the Active Army, the ARNG and the USAR using the Systems Applications and Products (SAP) in Data
Processing software, a COTS ERP solution.
■ GFEBS replaced or absorbs more than 80 legacy accounting and asset management systems to
standardize business processes and transactional input across the Army. GFEBS is one of the largest ERP
systems in DOD supporting thousands of transactions each day.
■ By July 2012, GFEBS completed the final Wave for Full Deployment to 227 sites supporting over 50,000
customers world-wide to facilitate the management of nearly $140 billion in the General Fund, and an
additional $80 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations funds.
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
3
3
Workload Automation
Control-M and GFEBS
MAGIC QUADRANT
Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling
Source: Gartner (April 2009)
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
4
4
Workload Automation
Control-M and GFEBS
The Control-M Job scheduler supports the GFEBS system by automating SAP, Oracle database, Cron,
and backups batch jobs. By selecting and implementing the tool, it eliminated the constant manual
intervention needed to ensure completion of batch jobs and reduced time spent re-initiating jobs;
additionally in supporting the warfighter, army personnel rely on the GFEBS system for accuracy in HR,
funding, vendor pay, and payroll related activities;
The solution allowed GFEBS to maximize automation by providing cross-application and cross-platform
scheduling capabilities, such as job dependencies, workload balancing, management by exception, and
status-based job execution. The tool prevented scheduling problems/conflicts from developing into
business problems by:
 Predicting the batch flow for a specific dates
 Enabling “what-if” scenarios so that you can accesses the impact of changes before implementing
them
 Provides a visual calendar of dates when jobs are scheduled, validating the accuracy of complicated
scheduling rules
 Presents trend analysis and enforces balanced workloads
 Alerting team members on exceptions and shows business impact
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
5
5
Workload Automation
Control-M Architecture
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
6
6
GFEBS Control-M Host Environment
Development /QA/Staging Testing Path:
■ The development environment is used to test individual jobs and process chains in Control-M. QA
systems are used to test migration strategy of jobs / process chains. Staging Systems are the final
test path before promotion to production and is used to test the entire set of jobs / process chains to
verify that they will run as expected in production.
Testing Jobs, Dependencies, Frequency, Alerts:
■ We use Control-M to create, schedule, and monitor ECC and XI batch jobs and execute BI process
chains. Additionally, Control-M can also be used to monitor spawned ECC and XI jobs. The jobs in
Control-M will be configured based on their current known dependencies with the following criteria:
Jobs selected for deployment are analyzed for additional dependencies
Where possible the additional dependencies will be included
Control-M utilizes the SMTP relay servers in the datacenters to send email alerts to the
appropriate recipients and devices
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
7
7
GFEBS Control-M Application Architecture
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
8
8
GFEBS Control-M Modules
Control-M/Enterprise Manager:
 Primary focal point that brings these independents schedulers together performing as a collection of
client-server components that control and manage batch jobs: provides a single, centralized point of
access and control that allows you to view, monitor, manage, and intervene in batch flow processing
across the entire enterprise; (GUI) provides the main interface to your real-time batch environment
Control-M/Server
 Scheduling engine that handles job scheduling and processing needs that can be used in the Control-M
environment. Several instances of Control-M/Server can be installed in a Control-M environment. Each
Control-M/Server is responsible for scheduling individual jobs, managing job processing flows, and
notifying Control-M/EM of job statuses
Control-M Control Modules
 Control-M control modules (CMs) enable Control-M/Agents to interface with external applications.
Control-M/Control Module for SAP enables you to manage both the traditional SAP, planned and
automated processes, and the unpredicted real-time, event-driven dynamic job submission
 Control-M/CM for AFT
Control-M for Advanced File Transfer (AFT) is an FTP/SFTP client that enables you to watch and
transfer files from a local host to a remote host, a remote host to a local host, or a remote host to
another remote host
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
9
9
Control-M Training
Highly Recommend WBT or Classroom Training
■ BMC Control-M/Enterprise Manager 7.0: Foundation (Control-M Schedulers)
■ An introductory course designed to teach basic concepts of distributed Control-M, and to
familiarize you with the functionality of Control-M/Enterprise Manager and the companion
scheduling product, Control-M/Desktop
■ Brought our support team up to speed and familiarized them on usefulness of the tool
BMC Control-M Administration 7.0
■ Hands-on practice in the setup, administration, and customization options of BMC ControlM/Enterprise Manager (Control-M/EM), Control-M/Server, Control-M/Agent, Control-M
Control Modules, Control-M/Forecast, and BMC Batch Impact Manager; understand the
monitoring and management of the enterprise batch scheduling environment.
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
10
10
BMC Control-M Account Management
Beginning with plan, design, build and deploy, the BMC account management relationship is
vital
Accenture/BMC jointly committed to ensuring project was successful
Held regular touch points on our progress
Visits by BMC SME for engagement with team administrators and system architects
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
11
11
Benefits to Accenture and GFEBS
–
–
–
–
Interoperability within PEO-EIS PM Organizations
Interoperability with GFEBS Remedy ITSM Service Management System
Accenture/BMC Strategic Partnership
Optimization of Staff
Performance Benefit
 Complete full migration from SAP to Control-M for the payroll process.
 Eliminated the need to monitor the process which takes place from Thursday thru Monday biweekly.
 Enable us to check for false positives by self-defined add-on steps.
 Immediate status update/notification on each steps specified in job chain.
 Monitor files at Unix/OS level for file receive/transfer between partners.
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
12
12
Questions and Answers
UNCLASSIFIED: FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
13
13