2013 – 2014 · Saint-Étienne, France · On-site
Production engineer (generic batch launcher)
Eovi-mcd — A major French mutual insurance group
Some sixty batch jobs, each triggered across five or six distinct functional scopes — the trigger events, configured by the development teams in the software package and passed as a parameter. One launcher per job and per trigger event, created by copying the previous one and changing the parameter. Logging commands, flow transfers, server-to-server copies and SQL scripts were all hard-coded into them.
No configuration management: launchers were duplicated between production and the pre-production environments, and their transit through Windows workstations introduced character corruption that only surfaced in production. The arrival of a parallelisation option on the vendor side, driven by an additional parameter, multiplied the number of launchers to maintain again.
A project spanning several months: consolidating the whole into a single launcher, parameterised by job name, trigger event and degree of parallelism, with the job resolving its own pre- and post-processing from the matching directory. Development, acceptance outside production, then production rollout; the entire schedule was reworked to call the parameterised launcher.
Achievements
- 300
DSN chain held end to end
Scripts, databases, loading, acceptance testing and production rollout, from the project managers' specifications and under the operations manager's oversight.
- 60
Reworking the schedule for the parameterised launcher
The script that created tasks and their links in the scheduler, written on native command-line instructions, had to be changed to point at the generic launcher.
Integrating the absorbed operations team
The team grew from three to six people; dual operations were held until the cutover.
Breakdown by sub-entity
The information system was unified after the merger, but financial processing remained distinct by sub-entity: the chain had to carry that difference.