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ActiveBatch Software Simplifies Lamar’s Content Scheduling

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Lamar Advertising, a 108-year-old company based in Baton Rouge, LA, operates more than 150 subsidiary, outdoor companies and 63 transit companies across the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. Its advertising options include billboards, interstate logo signs, bus shelters, benches and buses.
Lamar’s outdoor collection also includes more than 1,000 digital billboards. Creative content for every digital board is furnished, in real time, from the company’s Network Operations Center (NOC). A webcam on each board points back at the display, which generates a live image that NOC technicians can use to verify insertion orders and troubleshoot technical problems.
Between the constant image refreshes from the digital webcams and Lamar’s accounting and operations functions, scheduling data processing proved time-intensive and complicated. “For some time, the amount of labor required from our IT staff to schedule data processing was daunting,” said Jude Robert, Lamar’s MIS operations manager. “We had to write scripts that governed every business task from contract management to general ledger entries. Our homegrown scheduler was simply costing too much to maintain — it consumed the time and abilities of one of our key IT programmers, which was having a real impact on our IT efficiency.”
Realizing that a homegrown scheduler was costly as well as time consuming, Robert searched for a best-in-class commercial product. “I found a white paper online that listed a dozen or so top job schedulers. We visited the sites and did lots of demos. Our final choice was ActiveBatch.”
ActiveBatch, from Advanced Systems Concepts (Morristown, NJ), is a cross-platform workload automation and job-scheduling software solution that supports a modern, distributed, job-scheduling and workload-automation system.
ActiveBatch allows enterprises to centrally manage disparate jobs and workflows, including tasks involving the most common operating systems, enterprise business applications and even web services. Using the product’s central dashboard, Integrated Jobs Library, event-based architecture and “production- ready” job steps, ActiveBatch also helps users optimize enterprise resources as well as efficiently expedite the IT workload automation process.
Once the company installed ActiveBatch, it almost immediately began to realize the human resource benefits. Robert said, “By eliminating the need to write scripts for our scheduled tasks, we can focus our IT resources on our core, outdoor-advertising business. We have more time for operations, which makes our IT organization a lot nimbler.”
ActiveBatch has also provided new capabilities for the Lamar MIS team. “Our homegrown solution had no inherent functionality like ActiveBatch does,” Robert said. “Copying a file wasn’t part of the system, for example. We had to implement even the simplest tasks in code. We also were very limited in notifications. Now we have easy options for email triggering, event-based scheduling, even .NET.”
With ActiveBatch in place, Lamar Advertising can use templated steps for most scheduled jobs. By no longer writing scripts, it can quickly debug and maintain the existing workflows it created in-house, as well as create and implement new jobs.
“ActiveBatch allows us to get a better handle on what we’re running nightly. It also manages near-realtime tasks like our webcam updates, which are refreshed continually, 24 hours a day,” Robert said. “Now everything is handled with one very flexible, centralized solution.”
(800) 229-2724 or (973) 539 2660; www.advsyscon.com
 

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