Black Hawk College is a comprehensive community college serving over 11,000 college credit students, 3,000 Adult Basic Education students and 16,000 Continuing Education and Workforce Training adults a year with cost-effective lifelong learning. Two campuses offer excellent facilities, small class size and individual attention. The Quad-Cities Campus is located in Moline, Illinois and the East Campus is near Kewanee, Illinois. ISE recently spoke with Lucille Bealer and Jana Arpy of Black Hawk College to discuss their use of EnterpriseSCHEDULE to control and submit their Sunguard SCT Banner jobs. Banner is a widely used collegiate administrative solution that Black Hawk College uses to administer a large part of their internal data concerning student records and financial aid. Their challenge was to eliminate the need for manual operator interaction to enter necessary parameters so the jobs could be run automatically. By automating the process they could reduce the number of employees performing monotonous manual job submission.

After choosing EnterpriseSCHEDULE as their job scheduling solution, Black Hawk went to work converting their Banner jobs to EnterpriseSCHEDULE. First they downloaded the Quick Start Instructions and loaded and became familiar with the system. Then, with the aid of ISE’s tech support they created custom EnterpriseSCHEDULE jobs that automated the process of parameter input and scanning the output files for success or failure.

They were very pleased with the assistance they received while building their EnterpriseSCHEDULE Banner jobsets.

Lucille Bealer and Jana Arpy
Black Hawk College

Once the Banner job processing was automated, Black Hawk could go about utilizing EnterpriseSCHEDULE’s advanced scheduling and interdependency features to streamline their operation. The parameter values only have to be entered once and can be modified later using the custom forms. This saves the headache of constantly having to enter routine data like usernames, passwords and dates each time a job is run. Upon submission, the job utilizes the data entered to control the output of the job.

When completed, Banner jobs output a file that contains useful error messages. EnterpriseSCHEDULE automatically scans for error codes that can be used to determine the continuation of a job stream based on interdependencies. This enables operators to set simple or complex interdependencies between jobs, provide e-mail, opcom or pager notification when jobs abort or to restart the job any number of times on failure.

Lucille and Jana were very pleased with the assistance they received while building their EnterpriseSCHEDULE Banner jobsets. They said that ISE always provided them with an answer to their general and technical questions about their contract. In summation they said that support has been wonderful.