Shoe Carnival is a publicly held retail footwear company with 265 stores. They are a leading retailer of brand name footwear for the entire family with a unique and fun in-store atmosphere. The open format, catchy music and friendly associates set the stage for a great time and a memorable shopping experience. The terrific product selection, great brand names and value pricing make the mix unbeatable and further distinguish Shoe Carnival from its competitors. 

In a conversation with Shoe Carnival's Operation Manager's J.W. Johnston and Paul Maglinger, we discussed the way EnterpriseSCHEDULE from ISE has greatly enhanced how they automate their daily operations. With daily processing of over 3500 jobs on two ES40's running Tru64 UNIX, the scheduler is put to test constantly and J.W. and Paul feel it withstands the test. The daily operations consist of the processing of aggregate data from their many retail outlets and turning it into reports. The jobs are used to aggregate everything from sales and inventory to merchandising and distribution operations. By gathering figures from retail outlets as they become available and processing it on an ad hoc job basis in EnterpriseSCHEDULE, operations are kept fresh and up-to-date.

They say that “from a standpoint of automating the processing it's been very successful”.

J.W. Johnston and Paul Maglinger
Operation Managers
Shoe Carnival

Of the 3500 EnterpriseSCHEDULE jobs run a day, about 1500 are prescheduled but the majority are produced using direct input from about 180 users throughout the operation. These ad hoc jobs are created using an Oracle interface into which current data is input. The data is then output to a file which is processed using the script processing features built into EnterpriseSCHEDULE. Once completed, a detailed record is produced using EnterpriseSCHEDULE's history module that is then checked by the staff to assure that all job processing has completed successfully. Once the job has completed successfully, it is deleted automatically from the EnterpriseSCHEDULE database. 

When asked how important EnterpriseSCHEDULE has become to their operation, J.W. stated that "basically we run our whole business using the scheduler". In other words, every job that is run by this massive retail outlet is run either scheduled or ad hoc in EnterpriseSCHEDULE. J.W. and Paul commented that the implementation of EnterpriseSCHEDULE has gone well and "from a standpoint of automating the processing, it's been very successful". They also commented that when EnterpriseSCHEDULE is processing their data, they "know the reports are going to be done".