The Company

Robert Horne Group (RHG) is a leading supplier of substrates to the printing industry. These include paper, plastics and vinyl or, to put it another way, almost anything that can be printed on! The Group is headquartered in Northampton, with offices around the UK and is part of the Dutch based Buhrmann Group - the world’s largest paper merchant. They pride themselves on providing a next day service for all orders, which requires the warehouse at Northampton to be operational for twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week.

The Issue

As an organization running to very tight time deadlines for its entire operation, it is vital that RHG has a reliable and efficient IT system. The company has to run all its end of day processing, backup and other maintenance tasks, while the warehouse systems are still operating. In total this amounts to over 600 events, which have to run at the right time and in the correct order to ensure that all the information is processed properly. To prevent having to employ an expensive night shift, this needs to be done in a “lights out” environment.

The Main Trading system is centrally based in Northampton and consists of two 1200 and two 4000 HP Alpha servers, which run OpenVMS version 7.1-2. XS-EnterpriseSCHEDULE has been used for nearly ten years to schedule the jobs on these servers for RHG. Recently Windows 2000 server systems were implemented to provide vital specific solutions such as demand forecasting. Long and detailed scripts were being developed to manage the scheduling of jobs and the transfer of strategic data between VMS and the Windows systems. This required a large amount of skilled man-hours, was not very user friendly and didn’t provide all of the required

"It has proved reliable, easy to use and VERY cost effective as we can run it unmanned overnight”.
Duncan Borland
Computer Services Manager
Robert Horne Group

The Resolution

RHG were looking to replace the home-grown scheduling scripts that were written for the Windows systems. Duncan Borland, the Computer Services Manager at RHG , explained “We had been using XS-EnterpriseSCHEDULE on the OpenVMS side for a number of years and it has proved to be mission critical for the running of the organization. With the introduction of the Windows systems, we needed to be able to schedule a number of jobs in the same way as we were doing with OpenVMS. The scripts weren’t really an effective way of doing this, for example, if there was a problem with a job someone had to trawl through hundreds of lines of code to identify the cause. By contrast, when running XS- EnterpriseSCHEDULE on the NT system, either the client interface or a generated report pinpoints the error, which can then be resolved quickly. 

Duncan continued “When XS-EnterpriseSCHEDULE became available on Windows, with its attractive GUI and the same functionality as the OpenVMS version, we wasted no time in purchasing it from XuiS. We have been extremely satisfied with XS- EnterpriseSCHEDULE because it has proved reliable, easy to use and VERY cost effective as we can run it unmanned overnight. This eliminated the need for an expensive night shift and the fact that it is so easy to operate has also freed up our high-end staff”.

The added advantage for those at RHG operating XS-EnterpriseSCHEDULE is that they know 24-hour technical support from XuiS is only a telephone call away. So any problems can get dealt with quickly and speedily resolved. “By having XS- EnterpriseSCHEDULE on the Windows side as well I can sleep easy at night knowing that all the company’s vital jobs are running under the watchful eye of the most comprehensive scheduling solution available” adds Kevin Lawson the Systems Manager at RHG.

When asked about the importance of XS-EnterpriseSCHEDULE to his company Duncan said, “It would be fair to say that without this software solution Robert Horne Group would find it very difficult to operate as efficiently as it does”. Now praise does not come much higher than that.