Tata Consultancy Services - Innovation in Technology Management, Planning & Implementation
Name of Organization / Company: Tata Consultancy Services
Category: Award for Innovation in Technology Management, Planning & Implementation > Other Service Industries
Entry Title: AUTONOMOUS ENTERPRISE – TCS SMART BATCH OPERATIONS
TCS, a global IT services and consulting organization, caters to 1000+ customers across the world. While providing top-notch solutions to its customers, it is equally important to have a robust, futuristic ecosystem that can support these initiatives. Hence, TCS has been constantly reinventing itself and is on a continuous journey towards building a resilient, and adaptable organization.
With its Machine First Delivery Model™ which seeks to optimize machine-human collaboration to drive business value, TCS embarked upon to make the internal processes faster and simplify the complex, dynamic IT ecosystem to bring in agility. One critical step taken towards it was to eliminate low-value, time-consuming jobs by making its IT operations, specifically batch jobs, “smarter”. Automated workloads and batch jobs are backbone required for day-to-day operations but the sheer size and complexity of workloads (ranging in thousands) catches Business IT teams by surprise.
CHALLENGES
1. Scale, Diversity and Complexity: TCS, with 469K+ employees across 46 countries, has a complex IT ecosystem that depends on 7000+ batch jobs every day to execute critical business processes. With-interdependency-between-these-business-processes, the-batch-jobs-generating-critical-reports-are-also-dependent-on-each-other. Any-delay-could-have-a-potential impact on the business. TCS had already automated many of these batch jobs, but still needed manual intervention to interlink them. Also, many of them had their independent batch scheduling tools, adding to the complexity.
2. Siloed IT Operations: Lack of proper visibility and coordination between different functions resulted in undue delays and failures, impacting the business outcome.
3. Decrease in productivity: Team was involved in low-value, time-consuming jobs (debugging to find the issues, scheduling different batches at different times) leaving them with little time for innovation.
4. Dynamic environment: New batches are deployed, and old ones are retired periodically. However, at a large scale, the impact of such changes can be difficult to gauge. This was further worsened by a lack of end-to-end visibility, difficulties in predicting any outages, resulting in “surprises” when any batch would fail unexpectedly.
Hence, there was need to change from this reactive mode of operations.
SOLUTION
TCS implemented an intuitive Batch Management System and transformed IT operations from reactive to proactive and predictive, making business processes agile-
1. Centralized, Intelligent Orchestration System: TCS deployed a leading orchestration solution leveraging its partner ecosystem, which
a. Proactively schedules and executes workloads anywhere, anytime, eliminating the need for disparate and incompatible schedulers that muddled the operations, bringing in much needed uniformity and transparency
b. With a built-in contextual knowledge of the business processes, the intelligent system has made the processes more resilient and eliminated the manual dependency.
c. Generates automated reports on failures, helping teams to reduce the time required for root cause analysis.
2. Advanced Analytical Insights leveraging AI/ML: The dashboard is integrated with TCS’ ignio™ AI.Workload Management (WLM).
a. Leverages AI/ML to bring in a paradigm shift from Silo to comprehensive, Manual to Automated & Intuition to analytics-driven approach
b. It detects anomalies, predicts future behavior, recommends optimizations, and plans for growth and change.
c. Intelligently predicts batches prone to miss their SLAs and proactively suggests potential diagnosis & fixes by narrowing down the root cause.
d. Provides a holistic view on the overall business impact of workloads
BENEFITS
1. Integrated operations-Provided a complete visibility and interdependency across 4200 interlinked workload processes cutting across 200+ enterprise applications and 27 critical business-processes.
2. Overall response time improved by 80% as focus-is-now-on-improving-workload-execution-time-and-resolving-issues-rather-than-identification
3. Faster time to market-Centralized execution and predictive-monitoring of workload-processes has cutdown failures by 30% and improved the delivery-time for important functions serving CXOs, audits, financial period closure, payroll, revenue etc. This-ensures-reports-can-be-generated-in-real-time-and-guide-accurate-business-decisions
4. Increased productivity-75% reduction in manual-efforts to process period-end-closing activities and 50+ person-months saved annually in processing payroll-across-multiple-countries, giving-employees-more-time-to-focus-on-innovation and critical thinking instead of putting in efforts to non-value-added-tasks.
5. Agile business processes-On-demand availability of business P&L statements-facilitating-in-quarterly-result-declaration-in-just-7-days.
Files & Links: