FedEx invents its own IMS tool

FedEx invents its own IMS tool

By Sandy Sherrill


Joe Bagley and Makram (Mac) Raboudi

Innovate: Verb, intransitive: To make changes; to do something in a new way.

At the IBM Information On Demand conference, IBM recognizes visionary customers with IOD Innovation Awards. These customers successfully implement IBM-based solutions in a production environment to unlock the business value of their information. One 2009 recipient of the IOD Innovation Award is FedEx, who will receive an award for Best Solution Powered by IMS™ and IMS Tools!

FedEx provides customers and businesses worldwide with a broad portfolio of transportation, e-commerce, and business services. They offer an integrated set of business applications through multiple operating companies that compete collectively and are managed collaboratively, under the respected FedEx brand. Consistently ranked among the world’s most admired and trusted employers, FedEx inspires its more than 290,000 team members to remain absolutely, positively focused on safety, the highest ethical and professional standards, and the needs of their customers and communities.

FedEx’s main goal is to provide the highest level of availability possible on all of their systems. The IMS Support group’s responsibility regarding this goal is to ensure that all transactions running on the mainframe are being processed quickly and efficiently. This means keeping the response time of all transactions, and the number of timeouts, as low as possible.

The FedEx brand is based on speed and efficiency. In keeping with that spirit, a monitoring solution to manage systemwide transaction response time is critical. FedEx needs the ability to identify every incident of timeout and enough information to enable them to both determine root cause and mitigate future risk.

Meeting the challenge with innovation

Traditionally, in a timeout incident, a representative from each different support group joins a bridge call. Every group would use a different set of tools to diagnose the same problem. In this scenario, the IMS group would usually use either IBM IMS Performance Analyzer or IBM IMS Problem Investigator, depending on the type of problem.

Joe Bagley, a Technical Principal with FedEx’s IMS Support group, shares, “The first challenge here is to set the right parameters and filters to generate the correct reports and share them with the rest of people on the call. The second challenge is the time needed to generate these reports, which, in many cases depends on the number and size of logs the resources involved and how familiar the person is with the tool.”

The Dashboard solution

The IMS Connect Performance Dashboard is a Web-based application developed by the FedEx IMS System Support team, including Joe Bagley and Makram (Mac) Raboudi. It provides a historical reporting capability for FedEx’s IMS Connect transaction workload. Using functionality available from IBM’s IMS Performance Analyzer tool, FedEx extended the product’s capabilities by creating an innovative application that reports their IMS Connect usage. Using this IMS Connect Performance Dashboard, the FedEx IMS System Support team can analyze their growing IMS Connect workload at an individual event level and summarize by minute, hour, day, month, and year.

Mac further described the innovative technique that their Dashboard offers. “The data is collected, analyzed, and summarized 24/7 and ready for display at all times. The most noticeable advantage of our solution is that all reports are available on the Web from one central location, so anyone on the bridge call can have access to them. Most of the reports are presented in both tabular and graphical format with drilldown options that allow users to zoom in on different incidents. The user does not have to be familiar at all with any IBM tools used in the background. So people with different technical skill levels can still look at all reports. Our Dashboard allows us to better manage our timeout incidents and helps us minimize any adverse impact on business operations.”

FedEx and IBM technology

The FedEx business is built on speed, reliability, and customer service. Joe shares that “we have been using IBM IMS Performance Analyzer for about 10 years. It has been a very reliable product that satisfies our needs. The IBM IMS Performance Analyzer development team has always provided us with the best support. They take our requests and suggestions very seriously. They have always been there to answer our questions and satisfy our needs. That is why we feel very confident using IBM IMS Performance Analyzer as the backbone for our Dashboard.”

Congratulations to FedEx and their IMS Support Group on this recognition!

For more information

To learn more about the Information Management System, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following Web site: ibm.com/ims