Best Practice

TCS Confidential
 SAS JOB
IMPROVEMENTS
DC/ SC/ Geo/Practice: KOLKATA
Name of the author: RAHUL SHARMA
EMAIL – rahul28.s@tcs.com
Date Created: 17 – February – 2010.

26 February 2010
Description
Project / Context
Our Customer is United Kingdom’s largest supplier of retail credit
services. It has collaboration with number of banks, operating
with a number of financial products for the consumer market
within the UK.
In SAS environment multiple jobs are running which are basically
doing some reporting and DATAMANAGEMENT tasks. The jobs
use files which are created by teams like Cardpac, VisionPLUS,
Equifax, etc.

26 February 2010
How we did it

Problem Scenario
XXX job on SAS Server uses files sent by Mainframe Teams. If any of the
files does not arrive by the end of the day, then the job fails with the reason
that “File not Arrived “.
If few of the files from the complete set of files had already arrived to the
SAS Server and then the job failed, then these files stays there unutilized.

On next day when the files for the job for that day arrives, then previous
day’s files which are already lying there at the SAS Server gets overwritten
with the current one. Getting these files back from the Mainframe Teams
involves a lot of manual work. This manual effort ranges between 8 to 16
hours.

26 February 2010
How we did it
Process adopted
This was resolved by splitting up the XXX job into smaller sections so that
each job works on respective files and does not wait for the complete set of
files to arrive. Like this the files which arrive at the SAS Server gets picked
up by its respective job and the necessary update takes place. Hence the
issue of over-writing of the file due to job failure was resolved.

Highlights

This helped us saving time ( in the range of 8 to 16 hours) and also the
number of incidents raised with the SAS Support Team.

26 February 2010
How we did it
Problem Scenario
XXX job on SAS Server pulls data from an Online DATABASE. The
amount of data pulled is huge (on weekly basis).

It is of the range of 2.5 to 3.0 gigabytes. The original job had four
steps of pulling data. The database from which data had to be
pulled, was not available after 9:00 pm BST. In one single day this
job was not getting completed because each data pulling step
used to take something around 9 hours.

As a result of this every week the job used to fail and then had to
be fixed manually. The manual fix used to take at least two or more
days to complete.

26 February 2010
How we did it
Process adopted
To resolve this issue, the job was broken down and five new jobs
were coded. Four of the jobs had the step to pull the data from the
database and the fifth one had the step of combining these
datasets together. In this manner the four data pulls were
scheduled on four separate days and the final job was scheduled
on the fifth day.

Highlights

This helped us reducing the number of failure count to the level of 95%
reduction and also the number of incidents raised has gone down by
99% with the SAS Support Team. It also saved the time as the manual
work was removed.

26 February 2010
 Why this is a best practice
Justification
These are best practices because all the processes described in the
previous slides proved to make the jobs run in a better way thus making
the BATCH more stable. These also made the jobs error / abend free and
helped us meet the SLA by optimizing the CPU utilization. This also
helped in terms of potential cost benefit to Customer.

Benefits
1.Manual work on the part of SAS Team reduced.
2. Less number of batch failures
3. Reduced number of Online Incidents
4. Productivity improved through batch optimization. The jobs finished in
lesser amount of time in comparison to earlier times.
5. Customer satisfaction.

The actual beneficiary is Customer and customer has got the benefit
permanently.

26 February 2010
How this may be adapted elsewhere
Replication
The SAS production Support kind of projects across the TCS would
get ideas for “Batch tuning/System optimization” by going through the
processes that were adopted for XXX JOB (SAS Production Support)
project.

Contact Info

Kakali Datta (+913366369361)

Rahul Sharma(+913366369362)

26 February 2010
THANK YOU

26 February 2010