JAMS Automation Delivers Data Quickly, Reliably for TyMetrix

Company Background

TyMetrix provides its customers, corporate law firms and corporate legal departments, with real-time reporting and analytics on legal billing and matter management. The Connecticut-based company serves more than 200 customers worldwide and supports them on a 24x7 basis. TyMetrix builds its solutions on the Microsoft platform, with .NET and SQL Server at the core of the firm’s development efforts. The large corporate customers they serve are often subject to strict regulatory requirements, such as those defined by the Patriot Act and HIPAA.

The Challenges

Using Windows Task Scheduler and SQL Server Agent, Tymetrix could not keep up with customer demand for real-time data. To deliver its robust legal billing and matter management reports on time, IT staff spent considerable time managing disparate scheduling systems, developing scripts to build dependencies between different systems. When errors occurred, the firm’s IT staff spent countless hours researching the cause and how to solve the problems.

TyMetrix owned a third party scheduling solution but it fell short of the firm’s expectations. After investing considerable time and resources to adapt its portfolio of batch jobs to the vendor’s proprietary architecture, many triggers still failed. The closed architecture made it difficult to find the root cause of failed jobs and to monitor the status of multi-step processes. In one case, the receipt of a customer’s file through SFTP or email should have triggered a long series of processes. When trying to identify the point of failure, TyMetrix struggled with what DBA Manager Chris Benvenuto called a “crowded” and “difficult to use” interface. The scheduler failed to provide IT staff and DBAs with actionable information related to the trigger and its audit trail. TyMetrix needed a more robust solution that could support reliable job execution and align with its Windows-centric application environment. A decision was made to replace the vendor with another solution.

The Solution

After reviewing several alternatives over the course of six months, TyMetrix chose JAMS from MVP Systems Software for its rich feature set and for the positive testimonials given by MVP customers. Benvenuto had heard about JAMS Job Scheduler at a SQL Server training event and again at a conference for IT professionals in the legal industry.

Benvenuto and DBA Steve Link cited excellent filtering capabilities as a distinguishing feature of JAMS that enabled them to easily view the details or status of each job, even when thousands of jobs were running concurrently. The SQL back-end, a feature that other solutions lacked, set JAMS apart as well. According to Benvenuto, with the SQL back-end, TyMetrix is able to “query the entirety of the JAMS database” when building workflows and automating tasks. Combining this SQL querying with its homegrown reporting tools, TyMetrix provides its customers with the rich analytics needed to make quick and accurate decisions.

MVP Systems Software assisted TyMetrix with the implementation. When describing the MVP engineer who came on-site during the implementation process, Benvenuto said, “He gave us a great head start. The support for JAMS Job Scheduler is great and they are very quick to respond.”

TyMetrix has converted more than 400 jobs since implementing JAMS. Jobs once distributed across Windows Task Scheduler, Orsyp and SQL command scripts are now consolidated in one centralized automation solution.

The Benefits

Rapid response time and system uptime are the key advantages JAMS has provided to TyMetrix. Customers rely on the company’s detailed reports to make important decisions quickly. “We are saving time on troubleshooting - figuring out quickly what failed,” says Benvenuto. “Our IT team can provide a very quick response. In most cases, issues are resolved before people even wake up.” JAMS enabled TyMetrix to produce a consolidated morning report detailing exactly what jobs, if any, failed, and the exact cause of any failure.

And, as the company grows and offers its customers more advanced matter management and legal billing solutions, the IT team is armed with useful predictive analytics. Business users of the data frequently need an estimate of how long a job will take. Using job estimate calculations from JAMS, TyMetrix can show how many minutes or hours a custom report will take to execute.

With JAMS providing intelligent automation, TyMetrix has created an efficient and responsive environment to support its IT operations as well as its customer facing business units.