Central Michigan University is a vibrant community of scholars, leaders and partners dedicated to achieving excellence in undergraduate and graduate learning. Even as a large, complex university with more than 28,000 students, CMU maintains a friendly, small-college learning environment with a strong commitment to teaching, research and discovery.

In a recent conversation with CMU IT Staff members Ken Popkin and Reid Mullen, we discussed how EnterpriseSCHEDULE from ISE helps the university's IT department stay on top of its background processing. Beginning in 2002, ISE worked extensively for many months with CMU staff to fine tune and troubleshoot their conversion of hundreds of mainframe based jobs to the Windows 2000 server environment.

CMU's decision to convert their batch processing operation to Windows was part of an overall strategy that included the use of Sigma System's ProSam financial aid application in conjunction with ISE’s EnterpriseSCHEDULE. They chose EnterpriseSCHEDULE in a large part because of ISE's commitment to support all aspects of the process from training to conversion to troubleshooting issues that arise during the conversion.

They were happy with the way ISE support helped them ramp up through the arduous process of converting their operation to Windows.

Ken Popkin
Reid Mullen
Central Michigan University

The CMU daily batch processing regiment consists of operators manually submitting and monitoring the progress of the job sets. The jobs consist of financial aid processing using the ProSam package as well as other administrative tasks. Because of ISE’s emphasis on interdependencies as a method to streamline job processing, the operators can easily monitor the progress of their job sets. On average, the operators are in charge of around 12 layouts on weekdays and 25 on weekends. Each of these layouts consists of a stream of anywhere from 4 to 20 jobs.

Ken and Reid were happy with the way ISE support helped them ramp up through the arduous process of converting their operation to Windows. The most complementary comments come from the actual operators who use the product on a daily basis. They are most pleased with the visual aspect of the product; showing them which jobs are completed, which are running and which have failed.