Shar Music Enhances Ecometry Retail Application with JAMS

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Shar Music (www.sharmusic.com) is the recognized string community market leader in the US, providing violin family instruments, bows, cases, accessories, strings and sheet music since 1962. A family owned business, Shar Music employs over 100 people in its Ann Arbor offices and workshops.

THE CHALLENGES

Shar’s charter is to supply musicians with quality instruments and accessories at fair prices and in a timely manner. Shar fulfills orders on a daily basis from all 50 States as well as every Canadian Province and from more than 60 other countries. In order to handle their online retail business, Shar has come to rely on Escalate Retail’s Ecometry application for processing online transactions.

Ecometry in turn relies heavily on batch files for back-end processing. Like many Ecometry users, Shar was relying on Windows Task Scheduler and/or manual intervention to run these critical processes. “Manually streaming these processes was a very labor intensive and error prone process, especially at month-end when processing significantly increases,” stated Cliff Hart, IT Manager at Shar. “Windows Task Scheduler is very limited in setting up schedules and consumes heavy system resources so it was not much better.”

THE SOLUTIONS

Shar Music personnel had experience with batch processing solutions in the past so they knew what they were looking for in terms of functionality. They also did not want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a solution. After reviewing several products, JAMS was selected. Cliff Hart states “I chose JAMS because it looked exactly like what I was looking for. Something that was affordable, very robust, and not overly complicated to use.”

“The ability to run processes across multiple platforms is critical since we deal with both Windows and UNIX systems. Being able to incorporate the batch processes from Ecometry into JAMS was painless. Being able to automatically insert parameters such as dates and file names was simple. With JAMS, we were able to set up a series of batch processes that are interdependent on each other and set up queues to specify how many jobs could run at a given time.”

Implementing JAMS was a priority for Shar Music. Within a week of purchasing JAMS, Shar had many of its batch processes being run and managed by JAMS. “After being shown what I wanted to do in a 10 minute WebEx, I was on my way setting things up,” adds Cliff. “We didn’t receive any official training from JAMS but it was not needed. They were willing to set up webex sessions if needed and their support is awesome. I would tell anyone who asks that JAMS has given me some of the best support I have had in 20 years.”

THE BENEFITS

“JAMS is running all of our month-end processing reports. JAMS saves us tedious man hours with no parameter entry errors. Just kick the process off in JAMS and go to bed! We are saving a tremendous amount of money by leveraging JAMS. Just set it and forget it.”