Control-M Reviews

From an administrative standpoint, we are mostly engaged in upgrading, downgrading, and fixing the issues on a day-to-day basis, such as integration with the cloud functionalities. 

My only objective is that the application is up and running 99% of the time. I will make sure that it is not down, and it does not impact my application teams. If it goes down, it has a major impact on SLA, financial, and everything, so I make sure this is up and running 99%.

Control-M improved our organization significantly. We integrated it with our DevOps model, which saved us around 32 FTEs in resource costs. We also integrated with AWS Glue jobs or other clouds, such as Informatica. It's compatible.

Control-M supports our daily IT automation tasks. It is the blood for my entire organization, integrating with every app team, including HR.

Control-M offers pretty good REST API connectivity with other solutions.

It is a job scheduler. It is used for scheduling jobs.

It is useful for any sequence of jobs that are complicated, such as Job A can't run after Job B, but if Job C hasn't run, you can't run Job B. Building that logic into a script is almost impossible. Control-M solves that problem. Normally, in large banks, there are many different dependencies. It helps with dependency mapping.

Banks need to bring the branches online at seven o'clock in the morning, so you have to finish your batch processing by the time you bring the branches online. Typically, if you've got a big outage in the middle of the night, it would take hours to fix, which means you will run late, and your backups and all other jobs will not be completed by the time your branches open their doors. Control-M can manage that for you. It can make some smart predictions and change the workflow dynamically so that businesses can run with predictability every night.

It keeps the run times of all jobs. If you need an SLA to complete a particular suite of jobs by a particular time, for example, 2 AM, it can provide the historical average run times of each job. It can help predict or forward plan to see what time it's going to finish those particular jobs. It can do predictive analysis, so if it's not going to finish by 2 AM, it can warn you that it's not going to finish by 2 AM. You can then build in some actions. Some of them may be less important. You can omit those for the night to save time.

We are a cloud service provider, and we have been using Control-M for integrating and automating the orchestrating applications in the data workflow in our production. This is the main use case for our flow.

We are using its cloud version, Helix Control-M.

Helix Control-M has helped us schedule the jobs and manage our workload. We save time in running the jobs. There is no impact on the software even if I schedule a hundred jobs at a time. It can accommodate all kinds of jobs. It helps to meet our large-scale requirements.

Helix Control-M’s ability to build, schedule, manage, and monitor application and data workflows in production is good. It is pretty straightforward. It integrates well with different applications, such as AWS, GCP, and various cloud providers, enabling job scheduling directly from the Helix Control-M interface without any agents. Integration is very easy.

We have a single pane of glass for scheduling and viewing job status. We get all the details in one window. We can schedule everything in one window. We did not have any downtime with the Helix Control-M. All the jobs have been running perfectly. Everything is smooth and straightforward.

We are mainly using the AWS Cloud, and we also have some GCP services. We can monitor all the details under the History tab. We can see all the past jobs. 

Helix Control-M gives our company’s business users visibility and control over their jobs and frees up IT personnel for other tasks.

Helix Control-M is very critical for our business. We rely on it. We do not want any other scheduler. It provides us with everything.

Helix Control-M has contributed to the overall stability of our applications and improved user experience. It has taken away some of the administration work.

We have been using it in the institute to manage all the student data and post-study processes.

We have been using Control-M in our IT department to maintain server backups and database updates and schedule regular updates. Furthermore, it is being used in our library system to automate periodic updates of library catalogs. Control-M also automates email notifications for event announcements and fee structures.

The best feature is that we can automate everything. Moreover, we can access all the features through one dashboard, which is beneficial. 

We have been using Control-M for managing simple automation tasks. It will be very effective in managing other types of tasks. Control-M has the potential and can be very useful in managing business aspects.

We use Control-M for ACS and Azure services as it has inbuilt cloud integration. We have a product that works on government databases where we use data scraping and then integrate it with Azure and OpenAI. This integration allows us to process data and get insights. We also use AWS services to save the processed data in the AS.

Control-M is a bit faster compared to other solutions. The job and coding are easier. Also, my DevOps and Ops teams work collaboratively with it, enhancing its efficiency. The workflow is much easier compared to the ACS services we were using. Automation is more advanced, deployment is fast, and version control has been simplified.

We use Control-M for orchestration.

The best feature of Control-M is its orchestration capabilities for any orchestration that's required. Control-M has positively impacted my organization by helping with orchestrating complex tasks.

The Alerting and Notification system is quite sufficient. It does what it's required to do.

The ability to deploy Control-M both in the cloud and on-premises is very important because the organization has a hybrid strategy, so Control-M helps in scenarios of moving files between on-prem and clouds.

We predominantly use Control-M SAP R3 jobs. That's our primary batch job load with external vendors and internally on our AWS instance. That's our batch load alongside a few custom integrations. They are not public applications. It's all in-house applications. We have integrations and API integrations for the API hubs, which speak to multiple other applications within our next case.

It isn't the only point of failure, but Control-M handles our business-critical, priority-one applications. We have other options. Control-M runs the SAP side for all batches. The time needed to realize the benefits depends on the scale and complexity. 

One use case was in health care and involved shipment orders. With Control-M controlling the workflow, we could effectively monitor it and forecast any delays. This enabled us to deliver critical products in under four hours across hospitals in the network. 

We can apply the same standards and run the same set of jobs across environments. Once they are tested in the non-production environment, we can move them seamlessly to the production environment. 

We have a nightly process of batch reports. Before Control-M, we spent around 12 hours manually scheduling reports in SAP. After streamlining the process, we reduced manual work to nine and a half hours. The business could update all the processes before midnight.

While it doesn't totally free up IT personnel, it provides visibility into self-service tools where business users can see their pipelines or job streams. It would be read-only access for the business side, but to take action on the job, they still need to contact the IT team. 

Control-M doesn't facilitate collaboration between business and IT users, but It provides a better user experience. Both parties can see what they are talking about, so there's no black zone for any of the parties. Before Control-M, the functional team had a particular nomenclature to relate what they had seen on Control-M. With the self-service tool, they can simply relay the job name. The collaboration starts there, and it builds over with a lot of other parameters.

We have several SAP systems such as IBP, S4HANA, SolMan, etc. By implementing Helix Control-M, we wanted a tool that monitors different activities on these platforms and launches jobs.

Each company has a different number of jobs. We have thousands of jobs, but we have selected the most critical jobs of the company that normally run in the early morning. We wanted a platform that allows us to launch the job, for example, from point A until it finishes, and then there is also the possibility of being able to launch another job from another tool, which could be a SaaS tool, such as IBP so that several jobs can be executed and finished in parallel. If there is a failure in the system, we send an email, and for much more important things, generate a ticket in a tool called SolMan so that the support team can attend to the case that has arisen due to the failure of a job.

All those human errors that we were facing did not occur again. All these processes are critical for the company. We have implemented 22 processes. One of the processes starts at eleven at night. The process runs in S4HANA. It sends data to IBP, and IBP makes an optimizer and then it becomes a request that specifies the national transfers of the products that are going to be distributed. In other words, these are requests that indicate how many products should be sent from one point to another point for the customer at a national level. At six in the morning, another team, which is the distribution team, waits for this request to assemble the trucks and get them ready to leave. If they do not have this request, the trucks will remain stationary. By having the trucks stopped, there is no distribution, so there can be a loss of sales. There can be a drop in stock. You accumulate inventory in the warehouse because the plant continues producing, but where are you going to put the new products? There are a series of consequences that can cause the process to fail because we did not have immediate action to create that request. This tool has helped us positively impact the company's processes. We could get its benefits immediately after the implementation.

Helix Control-M’s ability to build, schedule, manage, and monitor application and data workflows in production is good. When we went live and throughout the first stage of the project, I thought it was great because we received full support. Now that we have the tool live, I have presented more cases, and I feel that they are a little slower. I have to try harder to get their attention.

Helix Control-M has affected our ability to orchestrate data pipelines in production. It has been a great benefit. Little by little, users' trust is increasing. When there is just one small failure, they usually stop believing in the tool. With a more solid tool like this, we have fewer errors, which means more trust of the users.

Helix Control-M has given our company’s business users visibility and control over their jobs and freed up IT personnel for other tasks. It has freed us up a lot because previously, IT used to coordinate meetings with the company that gave us the manual service. We had to meet and discuss failures and issues, but we no longer have these meetings because that third-party company is no longer there. We replaced them with this solution, and it has freed up a few hours. Being able to free up the company's IT team is important because we have so many issues to deal with. Nowadays, technology and innovation are in full swing, and users are constantly asking for new things, so the more we focus on those things, the better.

Helix Control-M has affected collaboration between IT and our business users. Previously, our business users only complained about process failures, and now they themselves can reprogram. Before Helix Control-M, we had to send emails with the reprogramming. Despite that, they did not do what we had specified in the email, so it was all a waste of time. We wasted time with the business, and we wasted time meeting with this company. In the end, they did not do what we had told them. Nowadays, the user interacts directly with the tool because they have access. They themselves can reprogram those processes. There is less need to have a meeting, and there is also a reduction in the email replies and forwards. We have reduced everything. They directly interact with the tool to launch and relaunch.