How FedEx Inspires Innovation

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 system-wide 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.

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 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 drill-down 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.”

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!