* The company names and the contents of the case studies are given as of the time of the interview.

　Caja Laboral, a major regional bank established in 1959 and based in Mondragón, Spain, has chosen BSP's A-AUTO to replace its job scheduling tool.

　A major company in the Mondragón Co-operative Corporation, Caja Laboral provides banking and financial services in the Basque Provinces and has over 370 branch offices throughout Spain.

　Formerly, the bank used a job scheduling tool developed by a vendor in the United States on their Fujitsu mainframe which served as the core business system. When support for the Fujitsu mainframe was terminated, the bank adopted BSP A-AUTO to replace it, because A-AUTO has a good proven record in Japan and BSP provides support for each of its products as long as a customer uses it.

　By operating the existing job scheduling tool and A-AUTO concurrently, the task of migrating from the old system to the new one was made remarkably smooth. The new capabilities provided by the numerous functions of A-AUTO, such as managing operations by scheduling them in advance, and monitoring jobs in real time as they are run, have proved invaluable.

　For some years Caja Laboral, based in the Basque Provinces of Spain, has used a job scheduling system developed by a vendor in the United States and installed on a Fujitsu mainframe provided by Fujitsu Espana Services. When support for that mainframe was terminated, the company had to choose a new job scheduling system.

　When Caja Laboral asked Fujitsu to suggest such a system, Fujitsu Espana Services recommended BSP A-AUTO, which was already used extensively in Fujitsu mainframes.

　Next, the two companies started a comprehensive study of just how A-AUTO was to be installed. Mr. Jose Luis Corral, a system engineer and member of the support staff in Fujitsu Espana Services, says, "Our customer had a strong desire to operate a new system without changing the current style of operation. We decided that A-AUTO would enable a smooth migration with minimum customization, because coordinating between A-AUTO and a variety of tools is very easy."

　In April 2005, after working with Fujitsu Espana Services and BSP to develop a schematic design and a plan for migrating to A-AUTO, Caja Laboral started to consider the migration in detail.

　Caja Laboral wanted to migrate to A-AUTO while maintaining its current operation style, but study revealed a few problems. The most serious one had to do with the procedure for migrating. After extensive discussions, Caja Laboral decided to make the transition gradually, one application at a time, rather than all at once.

　Mr. Jose Luis Corral says, "For the sake of a seamless migration from a tool being replaced, we needed to operate that tool and A-AUTO concurrently and synchronously. A-AUTO has a utility that notifies its monitoring system of external events. By embedding this utility in a job being run by the outgoing tool, we enabled A-AUTO to know when a job was completed. In the same way, the step of notifying the outgoing tool that a job had been completed under A-AUTO can be incorporated into a job under A-AUTO. This enabled us to phase A-AUTO in gradually, by, in effect, mixing the operation of the old tool and the new one."

　What made it possible to migrate to the new system with no major problems or even risks was that the A-AUTO user interface was used along with various functions, such as parameter management, as requested by Caja Laboral. The bank was dealing with the management of multiple job libraries or automatically repeated jobs.

　The transition to A-AUTO has increased efficiency in operation even though the basic mode of operation has not changed.

　Formerly, jobs were conducted on a command base, controlled from an old terminal screen. Now the graphical user interface enables users to see the job operation status at a glance by using A-SUPERVISION, a centralized monitoring and control tool that is one of the A-AUTO family of products. Work efficiency has increased greatly, because it is now possible to check a monthly schedule in advance and adjust it as required.

　Mr. Jose Luis Corral said, "As we migrated to the new environment, it was essential to become familiar with and understand the new system, and to train on-site operators. As a part of this migration, BSP sent a technical adviser from Japan to Spain. He provided support during the design phase and also trained our on-site staffs. His support helped us become able to use A-AUTO without any worries."

　An IT system operation must be flexible enough to adapt quickly as business strategy changes. A-AUTO supports multi-platforms, from a mainframe environment to an open one, and by integrating system operations it enables prompt changes to the environment.

　Recently, Caja Laboral has been considering A-AUTO for Windows. This would link the mainframe environment to the open environment, and because it enables continuous expansion, it would improve the efficiency and quality of open IT system management.