Mike Abramovitch, director of software development for Global Credit and Collection Inc., considers himself lucky to have found New Jersey-based Advanced Systems Concepts Inc.-made ActiveBatch. In an odd coincidence, he was looking for a comprehensive task scheduler while another GC&C employee was simultaneously tasked with finding a centralized FTP.
“We had a need for a centralized FTP solution because we wanted a central place to keep all the FTP profiles of all of our business partners,” Abramovitch said. GC&C, a company that specializes in providing consumer management systems and collection services to Canadian and International retailers, needed to update its legacy system, but needed a fix that was fault tolerant.
At that point, he said his search narrowed. “When I went out to look at what systems were out there, as soon as I said I needed something that’s fault tolerant that cut out more than half of the (software),” he said. “(GC&C) needed a centralized place for scheduling tasks so that, if a task fails on a server, then it’s restarted somewhere else.”
But, after some independent research, he found ActiveBatch, a software suite that “does both the task scheduling and it has the FTP built in to it.”
Abramovitch also said that ActiveBatch was a unique offering because of some of the other must-have features included. “Besides the fault tolerance and full logging, it’s got revision tracking and revision differencing, which I haven’t seen anywhere else,” he said. That way, “if you make a workflow and then you later change it, it keeps a history of who changed it, what did they change, and it shows you side-by-side highlighting what you changed, which is incredible.”
Abramovitch said this can be an incredible tool to save money as it leaves nothing to guesswork. Faults can be identified quickly and, in a business where missing a deadline can mean a lot of missed revenue, it can speed up the process.
Not only that, but ActiveBatch allows for task automation, so that, if you build in enough governing rules, the software can actually enact them. This has saved GC&C “from having to hire to staff for 3 shifts, 7 days a week, because we can build in logic.”
This isn’t new for the software, as, in a 2007 NetworkWorld article detailing changes for version 6, vice-president of marketing and sales for Advanced Systems Concepts Jim Manias said that “some organizations want full controls, some want some controls, other people want no controls. We’ve allowed organizations to establish their own process.”
