United Natural Foods is the largest publicly traded wholesale distributor to the natural and organic foods industry. Carrying more than 32,000 SKUs, the Company supplies over 14,000 customers nationwide and services a wide variety of retail formats, including super natural chains, independent natural products retailers and conventional supermarkets.

Providing information systems support to such a massive operation can be pretty taxing on a staff but according to Ron Donohue of UNF, it is a lot easier using EnterpriseSCHEDULE from ISE. When they came to ISE for a solution to their OpenVMS and Windows batch scheduling woes, UNF had been summarily dissatisfied with the scheduling product they were using. With a total of about 600 jobs running on a Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly basis, the previous scheduler was unreliable and often ran unscheduled processes.

The process of switching over to EnterpriseSCHEDULE included personal training from ISE during the conversion process of the job dataset. Once the process was complete UNF went online with the new scheduler utilizing ISE support staff when needed. With jobs that run at all hours of the day extracting data and supporting the distribution center, reliability is essential. Jobs must interface with business systems, requiring interactivity between Windows and OpenVMS jobs that rely on the transfer of data between the systems. The jobs also perform weekend data file purges and maintenance

“The EnterpriseSchedule product has exceeded our expectations as compared to our previous scheduler.”

Ron Donohue
United Natural Foods

A good example of the peace of mind EnterpriseSchedule provides is during interruption of normal production schedules. It is critical the production schedule be restored immediately to minimize any further impact to the business. Initially, during the acclimation period with the EnterpriseSchedule product, Ron was somewhat hesitant to startup EnterpriseSchedule whenever a production problem, which interrupted service, occurred fearing the ability of the product would not provide a smooth and timely release of the jobs. However, now that Ron has had several opportunities to work with the product in this type of situation he can be quoted as stating, “The EnterpriseSchedule product has exceeded our expectations as compared to our previous scheduler.”

When asked his opinion of EnterpriseSCHEDULE, Ron said that he was pleased with its reliability and brings with it none of the heartache of his previous scheduler. He said that the product engenders a lot of confidence. In fact he sometimes refers to it as "Old Faithful".