Leading industry analyst and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates just released its EMA Radar^TM Report for Workload Automation and Orchestration 2023, and BMC is proud to share that Control-M was named a Value Leader and achieved the overall highest score among the vendors evaluated. Since 2010, EMA has published seven Radar Reports for Workload Automation and BMC has been recognized as the overall leader every time. In addition to BMC’s top ranking, Control-M (self-hosted) and BMC Helix Control-M (SaaS) were recognized for offering “… a range of innovative features that streamline the creation, management, and monitoring of application and data workflows… across diverse hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”

The report highlights four key evaluation categories where Control-M significantly outpaced competitors:

• Functionality
• Deployment and administration
• Architecture and integration
• Vendor strength

In the report, EMA also notes that “BMC brings an innovative and efficient approach to data pipeline orchestration. Navigating on-premises and cloud technologies, the platforms facilitate data pipeline creation, integration, and automation across platforms like Airflow and cloud services…”.

Highlighted features include:

• Seamless integration, automation, and orchestration “… of workflows across workflows across diverse hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”
• Control-M and Helix Control-M’s “… vast (and rapidly expanding) catalog of out-of-the-box integrations”
• Self-service interfaces for “… developers, data and cloud engineers, business users, and IT operations teams.”

During their research, EMA also interviewed BMC customers who shared the following insights:

• “I am the Control-M evangelist because of the flexibility and integration.”
• “Control-M is one of the most stable things I run. I don’t lose sleep over Control-M, and that’s my favorite thing.”
• “[BMC’s] commitment to innovation and R&D is impressive.”

Source: EMA RadarTM Report for Workload Automation and Orchestration 2023

Click here to download the report to get more details on EMA’s analysis and to learn more about how Control-M and Helix Control-M can simplify the orchestration of complex application and data workflows for your organization.

As technology continues to evolve, businesses must adapt to the changing landscape to survive. Digital transformation affords these businesses new opportunities to connect with tech-savvy customers and deliver more personalized experiences. In its research report, From Scheduler to Automation Fabric for the Enterprise: Workload Automation Transformation in 2023, EMA says “Companies across all industries are undergoing digital transformation, using technology to optimize processes, improve customer experiences, and drive business growth.” But, how far have businesses progressed in their transformation journey, and what role is automation playing?

The state of digital transformation

Digital transformation has been a hot topic for more than a decade. While companies often see the benefit of adopting new technologies, the majority of organization are still in the early stages of digital transformation. In fact, according to EMA’s report, only 37 percent of companies say their digital transformation journey is underway and only nine percent say they have fully implemented digital transformation or are planning a second phase of digital transformation.

It’s easy to wonder, then, with all the available technology and after more than ten years of hearing the virtues of digital transformation extolled, why haven’t companies embraced digital transformation?

The answer is simple: digital transformation isn’t easy. Because of innovations in areas such as cloud and data technologies, and constantly evolving best practices like DataOps and DevOps, companies have the opportunity to continually improve their business. However, this creates an ever-moving target. The speed at which a company can enact digital transformation can be determined by internal factors such as company size, company goals, technology infrastructure, and level of employee preparedness. Often, companies may have made progress in some areas of digital transformation, such as automation, but still have a long journey ahead of them in other areas.

The role of automation in digital transformation

Automation plays an integral role in supporting digital transformation. Workload automation (WLA) is particularly important. Too often, WLA is written off as simply batch scheduling. However, the role of automation has expanded to enterprise-scale workflow orchestration. With that in mind, it’s clear that WLA and digital transformation are inextricably linked. According to the EMA report, “Today, WLA plays a key role in both developing and operating digitally transformed processes.”

Organizations that take full advantage of modern workflow orchestration platforms will see the most digital transformation success. The further into their digital transformation journey a company gets, the more they require from their WLA solution. According to EMA’s report, 81 percent of companies agree that digital transformation requires more from automation solutions. Additionally, they explain, “Companies who are mature with digital transformation are more likely to test limits of their WLA solution.” With the complexity of digital operations continuing to grow, organizations must constantly find new ways to use automation to align automated processes with their business objectives.

Application and data workflow orchestration is a team sport

Clearly, digital transformation will die on the vine without the proliferation of automation and application and data workflow orchestration, and not just in IT. Non-IT users across the business can also leverage self-service automation and workflow orchestration to perform vital functions within their jobs. Automation has become so enmeshed in the day-to-day performance of departments across the enterprise that non-IT users are taking a vested interest in continuing its expansion and improvement. In fact, according to EMA, 85 percent of companies say that developers led the charge sponsoring new automation and orchestration initiatives among non-IT users. Other teams that commonly use self-service workflow orchestration capabilities include DevOps teams, data engineers and DataOps teams, cloud architects, sales teams, service teams, supply chain teams, finance teams, HR, and many more.

If you’re ready to start your digital transformation journey, application and data workflow orchestration platforms like Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M are invaluable. With Control-M and Helix Control-M you can easily build, define, schedule, manage, and monitor production workflows, and integrate, automate, and orchestrate them on-premises or in the cloud to make your digital transformation a reality.

Remember the old days when businesses actually closed? Someone locked up the shop and that was that. Today, business run 24x7x365. Sure, you may go home at 5pm (on a good day), but there are critical business functions happening all the time. And many of these business functions include file transfers. For example, retailers regularly update and disperse their pricing files. If that doesn’t happen on time, pricing changes may not occur online or in retail stores and revenues could be impacted. Or, if a critical payroll file transfer doesn’t happen on time, your employees may not get paid.

Face it. If you’re in business, you transfer files. The average company transfers thousands of files every single day. In fact, file transfers represent one out of every five jobs scheduled through application and data workflow orchestration platforms. To keep up with evolving business needs, IT organizations must be prepared to execute file transfers faster and more frequently, in a visible and reliable way. Yet many companies still use multiple tools and teams to support file transfers and their related workflows. Does yours?

It’s far too risky to manage file transfers that way. Using multiple systems impedes your ability to clearly understand file transfer status, and the service level agreements (SLAs) and business processes that could be impacted if one fails. That’s no way to operate.

To simplify and improve file transfers and related application and data workflows, they should be tightly integrated. So, if your file transfer solution is only capable of transferring files but doesn’t automate your business, it’s time to consider one that does. Here are six key capabilities your enterprise workflow orchestration and managed file transfer platform should provide:

1. Automate workflows and file transfers from a single point of control
   With multiple systems, you can’t fully understand when file transfers and processing will be completed. To get clarity and improve visibility for all stakeholders (while also keeping your customers happy and maintaining your team’s sanity), you need to manage file transfers with a single, integrated platform – the same platform that orchestrates enterprise application and data workflows. It should let you build, schedule, and manage file transfers (from the mainframe to the cloud) just like any other workflow, while providing role-specific views in a consistent and comprehensive way.
2. Securely manage external file transfers
   Your company transfers files externally to customers and business partners every day. Your platform should make it easy for your partners by giving them a way to upload and download files to and from folders they are entitled to access. It should support protocols, such as FTP, SFTP, FTPS, AS2, and PGP encryption.
3. Provide simplified audit and compliance capabilities
   Regulations change frequently, and you need to have accurate (and easy to access) records of your file transfers. Your platform should enable you to generate comprehensive reports for internal and external file transfers.
4. Deliver predictive/proactive SLA monitoring and alerting
   Having a dashboard view of file transfer status and endpoint activity, integrated with related non-file transfer workflows, offers visibility to all file transfer operations so that problems can be addressed before they impact your SLAs and your customers.
5. Reduce complexity and costs with a platform that’s easy to use and access
   Productivity improves when you don’t have write scripts for transfers, and people in your organization can access what they need from their desktops or mobile devices. With a single point of control, you can reduce time and expense for licensing and supporting multiple file transfer solutions.
6. Increase reliability with enterprise-level automation
   File transfers and related workflow are critical to all your business services. You need a robust and reliable platform that supports your enterprise every single day.

The bottom line—don’t manage file transfers one way and workloads another. It’s far too costly and risky. Choose a platform that enables you to see file transfer status, understand application and data workflow impact, and deliver mission-critical business services confidently.

Looking for a file transfer solution? Control-M, BMC’s application and data workflow orchestration platform, helps you securely automate internal and external file transfers, integrating them with all your critical application workflows  and data pipelines, to increase your visibility and control.

Learn more—watch this virtual seminar to see how you can get a clearer picture of your file transfers and the impact they have on your business services.

Do you know that most enterprises transfer thousands of files every single day? It’s no secret that file transfers are essential to business operations and the critical business services that depend upon them. In fact, BMC research indicates file transfers represent about one out of every five jobs scheduled through application and data workflow orchestration platforms. Data files keep getting larger, and the data used by enterprises is being shared by more systems and partners than ever before. Even the most modern data and application related services often rely on file transfers.

Business modernization initiatives are a key driver in the explosive growth of data. That’s why organizations must be better prepared to manage file transfers faster and more frequently to keep up with the workflows and applications they support. Yet, relying on multiple tools and specialists to manage file transfers and other non-file transfer related workflows is risky and can jeopardize a company’s ability to deliver high performing business services.

Consider these situations:

• If a critical payroll file transfer doesn’t happen on time (and you aren’t aware because you lack the visibility to see what’s causing a problem with the transfer), people may not get paid on time.
• Retailers regularly send pricing update files to stores. If a file transfer doesn’t happen on time, you could lose business by pricing goods too high, or lose money by pricing goods to low.
• If regulatory changes that impact your industry occur, and you can’t easily understand what impact that has to your file transfers, compliance could be jeopardized, resulting in fines, reputational damage, or worse.

Challenges with Managed File Transfers

Many  enterprises use multiple file transfer tools along with separate workflow orchestration solutions to manage their systems. When multiple systems are used, companies often struggle because they don’t have a clear understanding of when file transfers and related non-file transfer processing will be complete, thus jeopardizing service levels. This lack of visibility makes it difficult to understand when problems occur, and how to correct them (even if they do know there is a problem).

As more interactions between systems happen, additional time-consuming scripting and other manual integration efforts are required. Traditional file transfer solutions typically lack robust scheduling, security granularity for varying roles, SLA monitoring, web and mobile interfaces, and automated, proactive notification capabilities. When transfers aren’t consolidated and automated, they require more manual effort and expertise to fix when problems occur.

Multiple solutions are inefficient

It’s important to manage scheduling information and workflows across all applications and data pipelines, including file transfers, from a single point of control. Without the ability to manage data that flows among applications, you can’t determine whether a file transfer has completed on time or if a transfer has failed.

Managing file transfers with multiple solutions doesn’t work because it:

• Requires inefficient scripting and manual integration
• Introduces risk and costs as there is a greater likelihood errors and delays will occur
• Limits your ability to execute transfers quickly, preventing you from maximizing modernization initiatives
• Makes it difficult to monitor critical business services, which may negatively impact customers

Choosing a Managed File Transfer solution

File transfers and related application workflows should be tightly integrated with a powerful application and data workflow orchestration platform.

Make sure your platform:

1. Has highly efficient file transfer management capabilities, dynamic scheduling controls, and that it provides a single point of control
2. Includes a dashboard view of file transfer status and endpoint activity, which delivers instant visibility into all file transfer operations, including the status of transfers, throughput levels, and endpoint details
3. Reduces complexity and improves staff productivity by not requiring scripting or extensive training to install and use in production
4. Delivers advanced search capabilities that lets users easily find details of a specific file transfer, using data points like; transfer status, source, destination host information, file name, and other values
5. Provides secure file transfers by supporting protocols such as FTP, SFTP, FTPS, AS2, and PGP encryption
6. Enables anyone in the organization to access what they need from their desktops or mobile devices

Get Control-M Managed File Transfer

Address these challenges and move from traditional workload automation to robust application and data workflow orchestration.

Control-M Managed File Transfer gives you visibility into the status of transfers from the mainframe to the cloud. You get a robust dashboard view, enhanced security with encryption options, and reduced risk of downtime with automated monitoring and recovery features. This helps you securely automate file transfers from a central interface, integrating them with other applications and data pipelines for greater convenience, visibility, and control.

Unlike non-integrated products that exist in their own silos, Control-M Managed File Transfer delivers a combined solution that lowers risk and remediation cost in delivering business services. Controls are in one place to make sure critical workflows (including file transfers) are executed without disruption, increasing reliability by reducing errors. Plus, no scripting is required to integrate file transfers with related workflows, which reduces complexity and saves time.

What do ordering pizza and application and data workflow orchestration have in common? More than you might think. A few days ago, I was finishing up a project around the house and asked my daughter to order dinner from our favorite local pizza shop. She hopped on her mobile phone and placed the order through the DoorDash app. In less than an hour, two hot pizzas were on our doorstep. And because I’m a cool dad, I sent her money to pay for the dinner through my bank’s mobile app.

Today, we have more tech in our mobile phones than entire generations had before us—each with easy-to-use interfaces that give us self-service access to all the information and tools we need, prevent us from doing things we shouldn’t be able to, and are safe and secure to use. See where I’m going with this?

The same should be true for the business applications you use at work. If they are designed well, they will give you self-service access to the information or business services you need, whenever (and from wherever) you need it. They will be robust enough to help IT operations (IT Ops) teams manage security and compliance requirements, yet flexible enough to give teams throughout the organization targeted access to relevant data and functionality.

Your application and data workflow orchestration platform should meet those standards, too. If it doesn’t, it’s time to reevaluate. Here are four important self-service features to look for:

1. Built for speed: Your platform should be easy to access and use, and it should provide a self-service portal with quick-start tutorials, how-to videos, and other tools, so users can easily find what they need. Mobile support and web interfaces are also must-have features.
2. Targeted information and capabilities: The platform’s self-service interface should provide targeted information and functionality specific to each user’s role and needs. For example:
   • Business users should only see the data and reports relevant to them. They shouldn’t have access to (or have to sort through) information or workflows for other teams.
   • Developers and DevOps users should be able to make changes to application workflows, check the status of their applications, and inspect logs and outputs, all via code, to find root causes of problems or anomalous conditions.
   • IT Ops must retain control over workflow orchestration throughout the entire organization. This includes having the ability to approve proposed changes from employees (or the option to give them complete autonomy, if desired).
3. Role-based access: The platform must be designed so users can be given custom privileges for job creation, monitoring, and configuration. As business complexity grows, users may want to be more autonomous and set up workflow orchestration environments independently. Your platform should support this.
4. Automated policy enforcement: IT Ops should be able to build enterprise policies and regulatory requirements into the platform, so they are automatically applied and enforced for all activities performed by self-service users.

Application and data workflow orchestration is no longer just an IT Ops discipline. It’s common for companies to have hundreds (or even thousands) of developers, business users, and others accessing and working in the workflow orchestration platform. This is good for the business. Giving employees autonomy through self-service functionality speeds innovation, fosters a culture of agility, and improves productivity. But it’s critical that companies take the right approach. Bottom line—flexibility, accessibility, ease of use, and security are paramount.

These are just a few of the many important self-service features your application and data workflow orchestration platform should provide. To learn more about the self-service features BMC has built in to Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M, check out this whitepaper.

While job scheduling and workload automation aren’t new terms, the differences between the two kinds of software aren’t always clear. In this blog, we’ll take a close look at both and explain their differences in plain English. We’ll also look at a newer term, application workflow orchestration, and explore how it fits into the mix.

Job scheduling software

Job scheduling packages are used to automate batch jobs on a single system. All major operating system (OS) platforms have a job scheduler built into them, for example the Windows Task Scheduler for the Windows OS platform. Job schedulers are generally platform-specific and configured to submit batch jobs for execution according to a pre-defined schedule or after a dependent event occurs. Some examples of dependent events that can submit jobs in a job scheduler are specific days and times of the week (e.g., Monday at 10 AM or Tuesday at 3 AM); specific days of the month (e.g., last date of month, the first Monday, the 15^th); or the completion of another batch job.

Traditional job scheduling software generally runs jobs only on one machine, which introduces a number of problems for organizations, including:

• Siloed solutions: Lack of coordination between job schedulers running on different OSs, or even on different systems running the same OS, can cause critical related jobs not to run at all or run out of sequence. Job schedulers generally don’t talk or work with each other across platforms natively.
• Complexity: Scheduling jobs and performing maintenance becomes more complicated as several schedulers manually enter data on different OSs, increasing the possibility of errors and the time required by IT personnel to perform these duties.
• Manual intervention: Job schedulers frequently require manual intervention to correct problems between related scheduled processes on different machines, such as when a file is created on one machine and sent via FTP to a second machine to be processed.
• Programming resources: Job scheduling frequently requires additional scripting or programming to fill in gaps that occur when coordinating processes between machines and OSs.

Workload automation software

Enterprise workload automation software addresses these challenges by offering critical process enhancements to traditional job scheduling software, such as:

• Consistency: One standard graphical interface is used for configuring workloads on different servers versus having to configure job entries in several different packages.
• Better visibility and control: Centralized control is available for scheduling and running different workloads on different servers, providing a single point of control and an enterprise-wide view of all active jobs and job run histories for processes controlled by the software.
• Faster workload deployments: The software automatically promotes new workflows from testing to QA to production, eliminating the need to repeat manual configurations (which can cause errors) when going live.
• Enhanced data and analytics: You can schedule data pipeline workflows using the latest technologies.
• Simpler programming: IT no longer has to use manual scripting or programming since job dependencies are supported by the enterprise workload automation software, not by different schedulers, OSs, or the programming department.
• Fewer errors: Coordination between scheduled, co-dependent processing running on different servers is improved, resulting in fewer errors occuring when jobs run out of sequence or a critical job fails.
• Improved service level agreements (SLAs): Schedule changes are integrated to help coordinate resource commitments and forecast job completion times, ensuring that jobs will finish on time and satisfy SLAs.
• Optimized staff time: Less time is needed to configure, monitor, and respond with a single workload automation system than is needed for multiple separate job scheduler installations.

Enterprise workload automation solutions are to job scheduling software what a Tesla is to a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle. Both workload automation solutions do the same basic job (scheduling and running of jobs and processes), but you can do more, and do it much better, with the former in both situations. An enterprise workload automation solution is much more than a souped-up job scheduler: it’s a significant improvement in the entire implementation of job and workload scheduling.

Application workflow orchestration

The very best platforms have evolved to provide application workflow orchestration support for today’s modern use cases. They are also flexible and powerful enough to help organizations evolve to become Autonomous Digital Enterprises (ADEs).

A good application workflow orchestration platform will help organizations:

• Accelerate new business applications into production by embedding workflow orchestration in continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines
• Scale Dev and Ops collaboration with a Jobs-as-Code approach
• Simplify workflows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, with integrations to leading cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform
• Deliver data-driven outcomes faster, managing data pipeline workflows in a scalable way
• Take control of file transfer operations with integrated, intelligent file movement and visibility
•  Consume automation on-premises and as a service

Learn more

This blog provides a basic understanding of the differences between job schedulers, enterprise workload automation solutions, and application workflow automation platforms. To learn more about Control-M, BMC’s application workflow orchestration platform, click here.

If you’re interested in application workflow orchestration as a service, visit the BMC Helix Control-M web page here.

If you’re anything like me, you want to get your hands on products as soon as the need (or want) arises. Collectively, we’ve lost patience with out-of-stock notices in stores or on web pages. We are an instant gratification population, so all the recent product shortages have been jarring. From furniture to refrigerators, we can’t assume the things we’re shopping for will be available anymore.

For me, it was chlorine. As pool season approached this year, I started looking for the chemicals I needed to treat my pool. My go-to website had the dreaded “not available” message—and to make matters worse, the company was unsure when (or if) the products would be available. I spent the next day going from one store to another until I finally found enough chlorine to get us through another hot summer!

So, what’s causing these shortages? Many different factors contribute, but often it comes down to supply chain disruption. If one part of the chain comes up short, the whole supply chain is disrupted and customer demand will quickly exceed supply.

Modern supply chains

Modern supply chains are often managed with a “just-in-time” strategy. The goal is to have just enough inventory to meet consumer demand with the right products at the right time. Done well, this cuts down on excess inventory.

The process can often be a highwire act, though, requiring companies to try to pinpoint the right order quantities for anything involved in the creation and distribution of their product from start to finish. In addition to raw materials, businesses also need to make sure they have packaging and labeling for their finished goods. Beyond that, there are other variables to consider, like items with a short shelf life and having enough space for materials and inventory. To manage supply chains well, executives need data—and the insights it provides—and a lot of it!

According to Deloitte’s Supply Chain Digital and Analytics Survey, 76 percent of respondents said developing digital and analytics capabilities was most/very important to delivering their overall supply chain strategy.

To help keep track of all the data required to make critical supply chain decisions, many businesses rely on the scheduling software that’s built into their business applications and systems of record to automate data workflows. Unfortunately, that requires manually written scripts or implementing workarounds to connect siloed applications, so they pass information from one technology to the next. The problem with this approach is that much like supply chains themselves, if one step in the data workflow breaks down, all the remaining steps will be affected. IT and other departments must then scramble to find and fix the problem as quickly as possible. This creates unnecessary risk for the business and can negatively impact customer satisfaction and revenue. Businesses need a smarter, more efficient way to orchestrate application and data workflows.

Enter Control-M

Control-M simplifies application and data workflow orchestration on premises or as a service. It makes it easy to build, define, schedule, manage, and monitor production workflows, ensuring visibility, reliability, and improving service level agreements (SLAs). With Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M, organizations still use all their existing, vital supply chain tools and technologies and gain a single point of control for their application workflows. By gaining visibility into workflows across the entire supply chain process, they can predict and address issues before they negatively impact the business.

Companies around the world are leveraging the Control-M platform to improve supply chain efficiency, meet their SLAs, and most importantly, keep their customers happy. Here are two customer examples.

Super(market) supply chain improvement

European supermarket chain Colruyt guarantees the lowest prices for any product at any time. With 248 stores across France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, that’s no small feat. Living up to this guarantee requires a highly efficient supply chain that gets a large volume of products to its stores on time. As Colruyt’s operation began to grow rapidly, its leadership team realized it needed to focus on optimizing the systems and services behind its key business functions to maintain that momentum.

In addition to supporting the introduction of a voice product-picking system, Control-M helped streamline workflows and leverage available data to maximize the capacity and deployment of Colruyt’s shipping trucks, identifying the volume and weight of each item so it was easy to choose exactly the right-sized truck for the job. Trucks are now filled to 95 percent capacity. That reduces transportation costs, ensures the right products are on the shelves, and helps Colruyt pass the savings to its customers.

Sweet supply chain success

With products sold around the world, The Hershey Company has candy in stores of every shape and size. Getting the right product mix to the right stores at the right time is a monumental undertaking. The company must have the correct ingredients on-hand to produce the correct product quantities, and then ship everything where it needs to go. To make it work, Hershey relies on thousands of complex, interdependent application and data workflows that expedite transaction processing, data transfers and analysis, and reporting. The company turned to Control-M to automate its supply chain processes end to end.

Control-M also enabled developers and application owners to handle tasks on their own while the workload automation team maintained control. And because the new applications involve cloud-based services, Control-M helped Hershey automate processes across on-premises and cloud-based systems.

Conclusion

Companies can’t afford to leave supply chain complexity unaddressed. With so many variables involved, manually maintaining silos of automation puts companies at risk of missing critical issues that can bring their supply chains to an abrupt stop. The Control-M platform orchestrates and automates supply chain workflows and keeps them on track. Do you have the right level of visibility into your supply chain application and data workflows?

Financial fraud is a topic that covers a gamut of illegal activities, including money laundering to support large-scale criminal activities like terrorism and trafficking. It’s a pervasive—and expensive—issue. According to Deloitte’s Anti-Money Laundering Preparedness Survey Report 2020, money laundering averages 2−5 percent of the global GDP every year—a staggering $800 billion to $2 trillion.

Even with that astounding valuation, many financial organizations aren’t prepared to tackle the issue, which sets them up not only for regulatory sanctions, but also for reputational damage, both of which impact them financially.

According to Deloitte’s survey, 80 percent of respondents cited manual processes and 74 percent cited poor or inadequate data among the top five operational challenges they faced in complying with anti-money laundering regulations. Despite those drawbacks, manual processes are still widespread—McKinsey & Company found that of the banks it surveyed, up to 85 percent admitted their financial crime compliance and anti-money laundering activities were still done that way.

That’s way too high, especially now, when tools exist to help make sense of all that data and streamline your workflows. There’s never been a better time to evolve your fraud detection processes.

Getting ahead

Identifying and preventing fraud involves monitoring transactions and financial activities for abnormal behaviors or patterns. Distilling volumes of financial data from multiple sources like physical banks, ATMs, mobile devices, online transactions, and more, each with its own highly-complex methodology, can further complicate the ability to red-flag transactions for potential fraud.

Automating the process is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity. With an expanding network and reach of customers, the net must be cast wider than ever before—analyzing data and returning insights in as close to real-time as possible. Instead of spending a lot of time and resources chasing bad leads, an application workflow orchestration solution can help find quality leads faster; shorten the time to detection, prevention, and response; and save the costs of an actual theft and regulatory sanctions.

In fact, PwC’s recent Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey 2020 found that companies that got ahead of fraud with a dedicated fraud program later spent 42 percent less on responding to fraud, and 17 percent less on remediation versus organizations that didn’t have a program.

BMC Helix Control-M

BMC Helix Control-M is an adaptable, easy-to-use, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that automates fraud detection processing by ingesting, storing, processing, and analyzing financial data at scale, from on-premises to the cloud. By developing, scheduling, managing, and monitoring workflows, financial organizations can detect fraud faster, make sound business decisions, and maintain overall regulatory compliance.

Conclusion

In an ever-growing digital and global economy, fraud is having a significant impact—47 percent of respondents to the PwC survey experienced some sort of fraud within the last 24 months, with losses totaling $42 billion. Money laundering was in the top five costliest. To combat the threat, financial organizations must evolve beyond traditional, manual processes and embrace the newest technologies that empower them to keep pace with—and get ahead of—fraudulent criminal activities. BMC Helix Control-M can automate and orchestrate your multi-application, multi-national financial data sets to help bring your fraud detection capabilities into the future.

For more information on BMC Helix Control-M, visit: bmc.com/helixcontrol-m.

Hopefully, very soon, we will all be back to normal, although I am quite sure it will be a “new” normal post Covid-19.

In an effort to keep mentally sane and not turn into Jack Torrance from “The Shining”, I have been involved in almost nightly video “meetings” with friends and family.   Some of the participants are literally less than 3 miles away from me (I’m in Alabama) while some have been as far away as the state of Washington.  Some of these virtual get-togethers have included people that do not usually work at home.  I myself average about 32 business trips a year, some trips are 1.5 days long, some are 7 days long, with the majority somewhere in between.  But, when I am not on one of those trips, I office at home.

In order to pull-off these “meetings” I quickly coached some of these friends through how to download, configure, and start using apps that let us video chat while we remain hunkered down in each of our respective homes.  In our meetings there were occasional appearances by spouses and children, crackling fires in outdoor firepits, and possibly even an adult beverage or two or three… (whiskey-scotch-bourbon for me; I avoid anything carbonated).  I think I can speak for all involved in these virtual meetings, it has been a great way for each of us to maintain our sanity by allowing all of us to continue to interact with those we love that are outside of our immediate household.

As we attempted to solve the world’s problems on these get-togethers it became obvious that some of my not-used-to-working-at-home-friends are suffering from the “un’s” (unfamiliar, uncomfortable, unproductive) while trying to work remotely.

It is a complex topic with lots of tentacles, but absolutely one tentacle was how they can easily get access to applications they rely on from a machine that is not the one they normally use.

As we talked thru some of the challenges it occurred to me that some of the friends I have made through my Control-M related travels may be having similar issues.  They may be in unfamiliar surroundings working on unique or different machines, but they still must support their business.  It dawned on me that one thing that might help them is to leverage Control-M Self Service.  They, and others responsible for workflows in Control-M, can use it to monitor and manage application workflows from almost any browser from any machine, even if it is not the way they “normally” access Control-M. To see some specifics about how Control-M might be able to help normalize some of the “un’s” for your own workloads check out this  eBook or this blog post.

I think we would all agree that medical professionals and first responders and others on the frontline of the pandemic fight are heroes.  So are the factory workers and truck drivers and store employees who are all helping to keep stores stocked with medicines and food and other essentials.  But how about all those in IT who are working hard so their customers can maintain access to the services they need?  In my book, they are heroes too!  Thanks to all of you for doing what you do and for working hard to keep services running smoothly in a world temporarily turned a bit upside down.

Despite having worked with Control-M for over 20 years, I am hesitant to call myself an expert on the topic of workload automation. What I prefer to say is that I have heard lots of stories from people on how they have – or hope to – increase the level of automation to improve the delivery of critical business services. Me being an expert can be up for debate. What cannot be debated is that I have heard many such stories!

Over the 20 years as mentioned earlier, in addition to the discipline of workload automation (WLA), I remember hearing about many other types of automation such as: IT Process Automation (ITPA), Business Process Automation (BPA), Run Book Automation (RBA), and Robotic Process Automation (you guessed it… RPA) – just to name a few. These types of automation, including workload automation, often live separate lives, sometimes compete with each other, but I think most accurately should be seen as complementary to each other – especially when it concerns workload automation and robotic process automation. Some things are just better together – Laurel and Hardy, Yin and Yang, and sweet and sour, to mention a few. And I think the same can mainly be said when it comes to RPA and WLA.

Robotic Process Automation is software that automates actions – things a human would otherwise perform like mouse clicks, keyboard entries, or selecting information from specific fields or screen locations. RPA is ideally suited for automating human-machine interactions – actions involving a person manually interacting with a user interface.

Workload Automation, the discipline I have been involved with for so long, is software that manages and monitors tasks that help deliver business services. These tasks run in complex multi-cloud environments and encompass a vast array of applications and data sources.

I can think of quite a few stories over the years where both disciplines needed to work together to help deliver a business service.

Take this example:

• every time a customer creates an account in a retailer’s mobile app, at the end of the account creation a database extract occurs, creating a file that contains data associated with the new user account
• every time the prior step occurs the file is transferred to another machine where a Business Intelligence (BI) tool is used to manipulate the data
• the data from the prior step is merged with data that comes from a screen scrape task running in an RPA tool, that involves a legacy application inside the organization, resulting in a newly enriched version of the file
• this resulting file gets transferred to another machine where a data lake resides
• a series of Hadoop jobs run, ending with the creation of a report file
• this report file gets sent to multiple internal business units at the company as well as to an external business partner

This example is a mildly complex flow of jobs or events that need to occur – sometimes with high frequency, but always with very tight time tolerances – to deliver a business service. The third step is the sweet spot for RPA, but that step in and of itself does not deliver the business service (which is the report that gets generated and distributed in the final step). The business service needs all those steps to happen at the right time, in the right order, without exception. And that is Workload Automation’s sweet spot. Orchestrating a complex set of events on time, every time.

As a witness to this and the many other customer stories I have seen and heard, it is the combination of these two automation disciplines that result in happy customers because of excellent business service delivery!